[[Boxes] within boxes] within boxes

Although alphabetically literate cultures may train folks to read and write and, so, to think written stories, the stories they produce are no more creative or technically skilled than those of oral cultures. Virtually all of the stories incorporated or made use of what we today call the flashback. Flashbacks serve a number of functions. We could argue that the omnipresence of these flashbacks, including the long, drawn-out ones, was simply a case of listeners not expecting or desiring a strict linear progression of events; of their not feeling particularly uneasy about frequent interruptions to any principle storyline. Perhaps not unlike the king in 1001 Arabian Nights who has to wait every night for a new story (within a story) listeners would have had to wait until the following evening for the commencement of that “past” story to begin. The fairly definitive lines in the oral milieu between a story’s “past” and “present” are of consequence for another reason.