"The Devoted Friend" contains two layers of story. The parts that recount the actions and speech of the Water-rat, Duck, and Linnet belong to a frame story that encompasses the allegory about Little Hans. Whereas an unnamed, omniscient, third-person narrator recounts the frame story to the reader, the Linnet serves as the narrator of the story about Hans and the Miller. When the Linnet begins his fable with the classic phrase "Once upon a time," the reader is given a clear signal that the frame story is about to branch off into a secondary inner story. This story proves to be an allegory, as the Linnet tells it in order to share a moral lesson with the Water-rat.
Early on, the Water-rat interrupts the Linnet's narrative to comment both on the actual events being recounted and on how the story is being told. The Water-rat critiques the Linnet for the order he has chosen to deliver the story's events in, as he claims that "every good storyteller nowadays starts with the end, and then goes on to the beginning, and concludes with the middle." This meta conversation about storytelling underlines the story's fictitiousness. Neither the Linnet nor the Water-rat view Hans as a real person; the commentary shows that the animals are aware of the inner story's fabricated nature.
The allegorical aspect of the inner story is interesting for a number of reasons. For one, it is worth noting that the animals in the frame story express their opinions on moral behavior through the lens of fictional humans. This takes a common convention and flips it on its head. Whereas fables (which are allegorical by nature) tend to involve humans telling stories about animals to explore a moral message, this fable is structured by a frame story in which animals tell a story about humans.
Another notable element regarding the story's function as an allegory is the final sentence. As the overall story wraps up, the narrator of frame story ambiguously shares an opinion on the characters' conversation about the inner story—and the Linnet's choice to tell it at all. The Linnet has just told the Duck that he annoyed the Water-rat by telling a story with a moral, to which the Duck responded "that is always a very dangerous thing to do." This exchange precipitates the overarching narrator's first and only first-person interjection into the story: "And I quite agree with her."
The narrator's concluding comment is perplexing. Although the story about Hans comes from the Linnet, the story about the Linnet comes from the narrator. It could seem that the narrator is siding with the Water-rat and suggesting that the Linnet shouldn't have told the story at all. However, rather than paradoxically imparting the moral that all moral lessons are bad, it seems that Wilde is seeking to illustrate the value of caution and critical thinking. In the case of Hans, blindly accepting the moral viewpoints of others can be detrimental. In the case of the Water-rat, immediately rejecting the moral viewpoints of others without considering them stands in the way of self-awareness.
Wilde uses this ambiguous ending to play with the conventions of the genre. Fables are usually clear about their moral lessons—Aesop's fables even end with maxims that explicitly state the takeaway a reader should be left with. In the place of a clear maxim, the reader of "The Devoted Friend" is given an enigmatic comment that seemingly sabotages the whole point of the story that the narrator has been telling all along.
