narrators

we shouldn't make too much of a big deal about the nested-narrative structure of some novels. It's just a device - a fiction - that writers have used to compose their story. One of the ways that you can tell that this is true is that the outer-most narrator is usually a minor character / e.g. Lockwood in Wuthering Heights, and Walton in Frankenstein. When each character is telling their story, or their story is being told, it's told directly to the reader - it's not mediated through any of the characters further out in the structure. It's just that, in the world of the story, neither the reader nor the writer exist, so the writer needs to establish a pretext for the characters' stories to be told.