Robert Stevens

This essay seems to be about how fiction can exist within fiction (go figure, right?). Anyway, he makes his point most clear with his example of the story of the “Thousand and one Nights.” A fictional tale that consists completely of fictional tales, including one instance where the Queen tells her husband his own story and summarizes the others that she told preceding it. Even William Shakespeare makes ample use of this technique in his play “Hamlet” by hosting a small play within a play for a short time during the main story. He summarizes by saying the dreaming and being awake are actually very similar (if not one and the same), and that stories, paintings, etc. that can have fiction within fiction help to bridge that gap.