Comparing Chaucer and Boccaccio to the Eastern frame stories, the Eastern classics are more mythical. In One Thousand and One Nights, a first story was told

…on a day
In Southwark, at the Tabard, as I lay
Ready to start upon my pilgrimage
To Canterbury, full of devout homage…                                                        (l.19-22)

This is distinct from frame stories where the storyteller is the third person. In the first person frame stories, the narrator tries to persuade readers that it is a true event that he went through. The pursuing for the sense of authenticity was influenced by oral storytelling whose purposes are the circulation of stories. Authors at that time seldom fabricated fictions but collected stories and rewrote them to reflect reality, so that many of their stories were actually folk tales. Apart from enthralling details and uniqueness of the plot, one way to refine those folk tales is to claim their authenticity.

Another masterpiece in Chaucer’s age, the Decameron is also a frame story. In its prologue, Giovanni Boccaccio stated that he only recounted stories told “in ten days by an honorable company of seven ladies and three young men in the time of the late mortal pestilence”. The narrator in the Decameron was not the first person but a group of third persons, but still, the key for storytelling is to repeat what you have heard from others.

Comparing Chaucer and Boccaccio to the Eastern frame stories, the Eastern classics are more mythical. In One Thousand and One Nights, a first story was told that a king Shahryar married a succession of virgins only to execute each one the next morning, and Scheherazade, as a virgin offered to the king told him a tale every night without ending it. The king postponed her execution and the girl told him 1001 stories. In the first chapter of the Dream of the Red Chamber, Cao Xueqin claimed he “designedly concealed the true circumstances and borrowed from the Record of the Stone” and the stories were “visions of dreams”.

More interestingly, for more modern frame stories, authors would less likely to address the authenticity by involving themselves like Chaucer did, for authenticity has became less important in literature, and authors begin to hide themselves from their books, but the charm of the practice of storytelling is no less to people and still can be seen in popular art, like the movie Forrest Gump and the Slumdog Millionaire, both of whose protagonist are telling stories in the movie while the movie tells another plot in the same time.

People will always be enthralled by the traditional way of storytelling, despite the blooming of modern and postmodern techniques of fiction writing, because storytelling is the very first way we learn our first fairytales in our cradles.