Story Within A Story - Deeply Nested Fiction

Deeply Nested Fiction

There are several cases where an author has nested his fiction more deeply than just two layers.

The earliest examples are in Ugrasrava's epic Mahabharata and Vishnu Sarma's Panchatantra. Some of the stories narrated in the Panchatantra often had stories within them. In the epic Mahabharata, the Kurukshetra War is narrated by a character in Krishna Dwaipayana Vyasa's Jaya, which itself is narrated by a character in Vaisampayana's Bharata, which itself is narrated by a character in Ugrasrava's Mahabharata.

Another early example is The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, where the general story is narrated by an unknown narrator, and in this narration the stories are told by Scheherazade. In most of Scheherazade's narrations there are also stories narrated, and even in some of these, there are some other stories.

In Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, there is a narrative between Achilles and the Tortoise (characters borrowed from Lewis Carroll, who in turn borrowed them from Zeno), and within this story they find a book entitled "Provocative Adventures of Achilles and the Tortoise Taking Place in Sundry Spots of the Globe", which they begin to read, the Tortoise taking the part of the Tortoise, and Achilles taking the part of Achilles. Within this narrative, which itself is somewhat self-referential, the two characters find a book entitled "Provocative Adventures of Achilles and the Tortoise Taking Place in Sundry Spots of the Globe", which they begin to read, the Tortoise taking the part of Achilles, and Achilles taking the part of the Tortoise.

In The Sandman by Neil Gaiman, the necropolis apprentice Petrefax tells a story that includes a storytelling session about Destruction telling a story. It is later shown that this - along with all the other stories in World's End - are being related to a bar girl by one of the characters present at Petrefax's original storytelling session.

In Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years, Adrian writes a book entitled Lo! The Flat Hills Of My Homeland, in which the main character, Jake Westmorland, writes a book called Sparg of Kronk, whose eponymous character, Sparg, writes a book with no language.

In Philip K. Dick's novel The Man in the High Castle, each character comes into interaction with a book called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which was written by the Man in the High Castle. Dick's novel details a world in which the Axis Powers of World War II had succeeded in dominating the known world. The novel within the novel details an alternative to this history in which the Allies overcome the Axis and bring stability to the world.

In Red Orc's Rage by Philip J. Farmer a doubly recursive method is used to interwine its fictional layers. This novel is part of a science-fiction series, the World of Tiers. Farmer collaborated in the writing of this novel with an American psychiatrist,Dr. A. James Giannini. Dr. Giannini had previously used the World of Tiers series in treating patients in group therapy. During these therapeutic sessions, the content and process of the text and novelist was discussed rather than the lives of the patients. In this way subconscious defenses could be circumvented. Farmer took the real life case-studies and melded these with adventures of his characters in the series.