Wuthering Heights - Narrative Style / Technique

Wuthering Heights has a very complicated narrative structure. There are two clear narrators, but the novel is almost a drama, that is to say, dialogue plays a great part. Different levels of narration construct the story, not by the usual way of telling the same events from different perspectives, but the participation of characters helps in understanding what happens. It could be said that, instead of a multi-perspective story, this is a multi-layered story. We need to connect every part to obtain a global comprehension. 

        In the novel we find two times of reference:  a 'present narrative' — when Lockwood rents Thrushcross Grange, meets his landlord, Heathcliff, and asks Nelly Dean to tell him the story of his landlord, and a 'past narrative' — where the events told by Nelly Dean took place. Both are interrelated and got mixed during the novel. The reason why this is a multi-layered novel is that apart from the two obvious narrators, we have incidents explained by characters who had taken part in them, as Catherine in her diary at the beginning or Isabella’s letter to Nelly. 

          We can say that Lockwood represents a "narrative external frame”. He puts the story in context, and like the readers, listens to Nelly’s storytelling, although he gets in touch with the main characters in his “real time”. In fact, the whole novel is supposed to be extracted from his personal diary, where he took down Nelly’s words. She is, therefore, a “narrative inner frame”, since she has taken part in the happenings.

        As a narrator, Lockwood is very perceptive to details and changes in the characters. Lockwood’s narrative style is remarkably different from Nelly’s style. He writes in an educated literary language, with complex sentences, longer phrases, words of Latin or Greek origin. And Nelly is an eyewitness-first person participant-main narrator of Wuthering Heights. Her narrative style is very different from Lockwood’s; plain and colloquial language, shorter phrases; less sophisticated. It is very detailed, magnetic and soon engage the readers’ attention.

       The narrative technique is not easy to analyse. But, while reading the novel, I could hardly think of a better way to involve the readers inside the story. If the action has been explained by the comments of the author, or of an omniscient narrator, it would not have been so fascinating. The shifts in the time reference, events, narrators, and the great role of dialogue catch our attention immediately. Dialogue allows the characters to express themselves, appear as real and dynamic personalities, with a deep inner life, and we, the readers, just fall under their spell.