"The Great Gatsby" was told from the point of view of Gatsby's neighbor, Nick Carraway by name, with Nick using the first person. Nick gets to see a lot, but not all of Gatsby's dealings. A case in point is Gatsby's early dealings with Dan Cody, his mentor, at age 17. What gives Nick the "right" to relate these dealings? Can a narrator "show, rather than tell," by featuring dialog and interaction between Gatsby and Cody? Or must he limit himself to a second hand narrative of those dealings?
Actually, I created a story within a story as follows: First, I wrote it in third person from "Gatsby's" point of view. Then I put on my "Nick Carraway" hat and commented on the story that I was now able to read. Can a format like this make sense?
Answer
In Jane Austen's novels, for example, it happens more than once that characters learn about an event second-hand:
Darling, I've just heard that...
Or
It is only the desire to be useful that compels me to tell you that...
This allows you to introduce events that your narrator couldn't have witnessed, and it's not as boring as you might think: characters might learn about a past event in a dramatic moment (making previous decisions they've made suddenly wrong), the person recounting the event might colour it with their own emotions, their own POV, etc.
Taking this to an extreme, Roger Zelzny, in Chronicles of Amber has on occasion whole chapters of a secondary character telling the MC something that happened to them in the past, with no interruptions from the MC. It reads like a complete mini-story, told in first person. You wouldn't find a story told in first person boring, would you? Same here: it works.
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