A frame narrative, or a frame story, is a narrative that tells or reveals the central narrative in literature. Frame narratives typically use a narrator who is a character within the novel, experiencing their own story, to narrate the events surrounding the novel’s protagonist. This often takes the form of a character (sometimes the protagonist) recounting a tale to another character, wherein the tale being recounted is the focus of the text. The initial narrative line is delivered by an external narrator, Coetzee. Coetzee has a limited omniscient perspective. The narration is considered limited because it is given from John’s perspective. Elizabeth becomes a non-traditional secondary narrative during her long segments of dialogue in her lectures, answers, and debate responses.

The use of frame story is a genre convention within metafiction. The frame story becomes more complex in the fact that The Lives of Animals was first presented as lectures; Coetzee’s delivery of the lectures is a frame narrative for the story of The Lives of Animals, which itself contains the frame narrative of Elizabeth’s family life through which we receive her lectures.