SOURCE: "Narrative Structure in Maupassant: Frames of Desire," in PMLA, Vol. 100, No. 3, May, 1985, pp. 315–27.

In the following essay, Moger discusses Maupassant's narrative technique of using "framed" stories, where the story within the story is actually the primary tale within the frame. To accomplish this effect, according to the critic, Maupassant used a secondary narrator—often a doctor-narrator—and allowed readers to be maneuvered into a reciprocal relationship with the story such that the tales are created as much by the reader as by the storyteller.

Here we might refer to G. K. Chesterton's remark that a landscape without a frame means almost nothing, but that it only requires the addition of some border (a frame, a window, an arch) to be perceived as a representation. In order to perceive the world of the work of art as a sign system, it is necessary to designate its borders: it...