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Foreshadowing
Frame Story
Explanation and Analysis—Vianne's Memory:
The Nightingale itself is told as a story within a story. In the novel's first chapter, readers hear from the first-person perspective of an elderly, dying woman in Oregon who has some connections to the French and to World War II. However, readers do not discover her full identity until the end of the novel, when her point of view appears again to conclude the story. The bulk of The Nightingale takes place in France during the 1940s, a story later revealed to be a flashback from the first narrator's intimate past. Thus, the novel's beginning and end—which take place in a different time period and setting—form the frame of the primary story.
The first chapter of The Nightingale provides contextual and foreshadowing details to establish how this initial narration will connect to the remainder of the novel. The narrator's son asks her about a woman called Juliette Gervais, and the narrator's memory leads the reader into the past, which she recalls "Against my will—or maybe in tandem with it." The narrator's memory comes from France during World War II, where sisters Isabelle and Vianne struggle against the Nazi powers invading France. At the novel's end, Hannah reveals that the elderly woman from Oregon is Vianne herself, who survived the war and escaped to the United States. Isabelle, whose code name is the aforementioned "Juliette Gervais," died following her stretch in a Nazi concentration camp. The older Vianne once again appears at the forefront of the narrative, pondering the fragile nature of memory and persistence through struggle, as she honors her dearly departed sister.
By crafting The Nightingale as a frame narrative, Hannah stresses the importance of memory, storytelling, and re-telling during and after times of war. History, she implies, does not “start” and “end” somewhere—even if the novel itself does. History moves forward while also requiring memory to keep it alive, as evidenced by Hannah's usage of a frame narrative to deepen literal and thematic connections between past and present.
Related Themes:
