Books that use mise en abyme?

[Gravy]

Aka stories within stories.

Examples I can offer include The Neverending Story, and Brook Hanson's The Chess Garden.

For instance, in The Neverending Story's case, the story digresses off with another character before ending with "but that is another story, and shall be told another time", and going back to Bastian.

I am fascinated by this, and want to find more examples of it.

[BookishThings]

Right Handed Lefty includes three stories that intertwine. If you're looking for a good adventure novel with intriguing subplots then you will truly enjoy Right Handed Lefty!

[DATo]

That is a literary device known as a Mise en abyme, which roughly means a picture within a picture. An example of this would be a coat of arms which is depicted as a shield separated into four spaces with pictures of different things in each space. It might have two swords in one quadrant to suggest that the family which owns this coat of arms had on two occasions defended the realm in warfare, or a particular flower to represent some happening in the past history of the family of which the flower serves as a graphic metaphor. The individual pictures are all contained within the larger picture of the shield.

Literature borrowed the term to represent a story within a story rather than a picture within a picture. My short story, Werewolf, is an example of this and there are countless other stories to be found in literature which proceed with a narrator, in second-person narrative telling the story to someone else. We, as readers, are calculatingly positioned by the author to eavesdrop on the conversation which is the overarching story within which the primary tale is told. In my story (Werewolf) there are events which take place in the overarching story which serve as a story in its own right and complements the primary story. This may not be the case in all Mise en abymes, in fact, in some cases Mise en abymes never return to the original conversation, or introductory story.

[Gravy]

That is a literary device known as a Mise en abyme, which roughly means a picture within a picture. An example of this would be a coat of arms which is depicted as a shield separated into four spaces with pictures of different things in each space. It might have two swords in one quadrant to suggest that the family which owns this coat of arms had on two occasions defended the realm in warfare, or a particular flower to represent some happening in the past history of the family of which the flower serves as a graphic metaphor. The individual pictures are all contained within the larger picture of the shield.

Literature borrowed the term to represent a story within a story rather than a picture within a picture. My short story, Werewolf, is an example of this and there are countless other stories to be found in literature which proceed with a narrator, in second-person narrative telling the story to someone else. We, as readers, are calculatingly positioned by the author to eavesdrop on the conversation which is the overarching story within which the primary tale is told. In my story (Werewolf) there are events which take place in the overarching story which serve as a story in its own right and complements the primary story. This may not be the case in all Mise en abymes, in fact, in some cases Mise en abymes never return to the original conversation, or introductory story.

Thank you! I think I found the name of it before, but my brain thought it wasn't important enough to remember.

I'll edit the title.

Would still love some suggestions, if anyone's got 'em!

[DATo]

Gravy, you were not necessarily incorrect to use the term digression. That is the more commonly used term.

The Godfather, by Mario Puzo - In the book the story takes a detour and "digresses" at the half-way point to describe Don Corleone's childhood and rise to power, then it resumes where it left off in the story's "present". At another point of the novel the book takes another detour to tell the story of a family which offered its members as hostages for negotiations and tells the origin of this practice as well as the purpose of it. At another point it tells the back story of Luca Brasi - the Godfather's chief enforcer - and describes things in his past which are chilling. In fact now that I think of it there are many other digressions within this novel.

The examples I give above regarding The Godfather are legitimate but open to challenge because these digressions are still somewhat tangential to the original story. A true digression is totally isolated from the original story as in the example below.

In Don Quixote Cervantes used digressions which at that period in history were called pastorals. A pastoral was a story which usually had nothing to do with the original story and typically centered on the lives of shepherds and farmers. Stories of that period were expected to have pastorals included in them. Early in Don Quixote the title character meets a group of shepherds who are settling down for the night and they invite him to camp with them. As they sit around the fire a story is told of a shepherdess who was very beautiful but would take no suitor. A shepherd was deeply in love with her and committed suicide when she turned him down. The townspeople accost her and blame her for his death. She then gives an eloquent response explaining that the blame is solely on the head of the suitor. This very scene was reprised somewhat in Nikos Kazantzakis' novel, Zorba The Greek. In the original story the townspeople leave, justly reproved; in Zorba The Greek, they stone her to death. Obviously the story of the shepherdess has nothing to do with Don Quixote or his self-imposed mission to be a modern-day knight, thus its unassailable claim as a true digression.

Willa Cather also used "true" digressions liberally in her novels. Several examples can be found in her novel Death Comes For The Archbishop.

[SPasciuti]

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
The Princess Bride by William Goldman
Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zaffon (I love this wound and 10/10 would recommend, though it is a little dark)

And I believe The Little Prince also fits into this category?

[Gravy]

Thank you both for the recommendations!

[Lincolnshirelass]

I don't know if this is slightly left-field, but many folk-tales (I dislike the term fairy-tales in this context) of the Brothers Grimm, end in the original German with (my translation) 'and unless they have died since, they are still alive today' rather than 'they all lived happily after', which seems to leave the door open, and, in fact, give us permission to play around with the characters, as many have - my own favourite being the works of Angela Carter.

[Gravy]

Nothing wrong with stuff out of left-field.

I'm presently reading The Gargoyle, which fits into this category. Sadly, it isn't holding my interest as of yet. Other things keep pulling me away.

Like The Memory Painter, which also fits.