Yeah you could apply the word to a story-in-a-story like The Princess Bride, which has a narrative about a boy hearing another story. The meta-narrative would be the story about the boy.
You don’t need to get recursive with the layers of fiction though. If you imagine a long-running many-hundreds-of-episodes tv show, the show will likely be divided into a number of distinct arcs, perhaps season-by-season. Each arc will have its own narrative, its own story beats, its own themes; but all the arcs will be tied together by a metanarrative, a narrative encompassing the other narratives.
Is metanarrative the story of the story?
Something about grand metanarratives and postmodernism
Yeah you could apply the word to a story-in-a-story like The Princess Bride, which has a narrative about a boy hearing another story. The meta-narrative would be the story about the boy.
You don’t need to get recursive with the layers of fiction though. If you imagine a long-running many-hundreds-of-episodes tv show, the show will likely be divided into a number of distinct arcs, perhaps season-by-season. Each arc will have its own narrative, its own story beats, its own themes; but all the arcs will be tied together by a metanarrative, a narrative encompassing the other narratives.
…or the metanareative can be the structure of the story itself.
Here’s a few frequent ones (Kurt Vonnegut for more):
Someone ran into a set of problems and then solved them.
Some people met, overcame some stuff and then ended up together.
Things were bad and got better.
Things were bad and got worse.
A specific thing needed to be done and someone did it.