Question- Comment on the narrative technique in the novel; 'Wuthering Heights'.

Answer -

One way of understanding the narrative technique in Wuthering Heights is to see it as the design of a Chinese Box. A story within a story that can be unravelled by removing one layer after another. A room within a room that the reader keeps entering, in which the rooms are not only physical spaces but also spaces of the mind. It is to be noted how Lockwood enters Wuthering Heights. First- he is outside in the bitter cold and hostile environment. Then he enters the living room of Wuthering Heights where the environment is warm but his reception is not. Later, he goes further into the house and finds himself in Catherine's bedroom where he discovers her diary. The diary is the key to our entry not only to the past but also into Catherine's mind. This progress inside the house is complimented by Lockwood's entry into the past of Wuthering Heights which climaxes with his encounter with Catherine's apparition. Back at Thrushcross Grange, in more comfortable surroundings Lockwood's passage into the past continues with Nelly's recapitulation. This techniques adds a degree of suspense and mystery to the narration and provides a great scope for dramatic shifts- in time and space. At the same time, past and present is woven to together in the way Nelly and Lockwood interpret the events they are witness to. This travel into an internal, closed and dark world approximates the familiar narrative styles of Gothic tales in which the mind is turned on itself and the dark side of the psyche is exposed. But unlike their Gothic predecessors, the narrators of Wuthering Heights are shocked by what they encounter and experience because of the moral and Official standards they represent.

J. Hillis Miller in the essay "Wuthering Heights Repetition and the Uncanny points-out that there is a line of witnesses / narrators, from Emily Bronte to the pseudonymous Ellis Bell to Lockwood to Nelly Dean to Heath cliff to Catherine who form this complex narrative. Reading the novel is like moving inside 'inside of the inside' or sometimes the other way round. Just as there are many narrators in the novel, consequently there are many listeners. Nelly has been the confidant of both Catherine and Heath cliff. Both of them from time to time have felt the need to confide their thoughts to Nelly. A letter from Isabella informs Nelly of the story of Isabella's disastrous married life. Lockwood is Nelly's audience. Ellis Bell knows of Lockwood's story Finally the consciousness of the reader (we) envelops the consciousness of all the other characters including that of Ellis Bell. According to Miller, the reader is condemned to resurrect the ghostly part of Wuthering Heights. Different voices speak to the reader and no one seems to completely comprehend the meaning of the events. The reader is aware of something familiar but is unable to grasp it or even to articulate it. This gives the text its uncanny baffling fervour.

The novel does not follow the pattern of the unity of time and place and event as in the classical Aristotelian sense. Both, Nelly and Lockwood are continuously interpreting what they witness. By doing so, they attribute meanings which are coloured by their own understanding and moral commitments.

Most early critical readings of Wuthering Heights accepted the Nelly-Lockwood desire to explain the central mystery and attribute specific meanings to the relationships in the novel. From this position, the Nelly- Lockwood narration is seen as a appropriate and prosaic recapitulation of a relationship that in essence is raw, pure, wild, intuitive and natural- something transcendental and beyond the limits of reason. It wouldn't be wrong to call Nelly and Lockwood as spectators. One was a sophisticated urbanite while the other a simple peasant woman. The intensity of the drama cut across class or intellectual barriers in the way the novel moves from the world of everyday reality to the world of 'spiritual reality'.

The author's unconventionality was in her ability to create characters like Heathcliff and Catherine who defied present day moral and social desmarcations in order to achieve higher, spiritual levels of meaning and being. 'Wuthering Heights' was a triumph of the Romantic imagination in its quest for an ideal that sought an alternative to the mundane and base nature of everyday to reality.

Some deconstructive analysis suggest that the narrative is designed in the form of frames. The analogy is derived from picture / painting frames. A picture frame encloses within it a picture. Though the focus is on, what is pictured inside the frame, the viewer is aware of what is outside it and not pictured. The 'internal' suggests the 'external' and it is for the viewer/reader to decipher it. There are various boundaries that defines the limits of these frames in 'Wuthering Heights'. There is the outer boundary of a time and place in which Nelly entertains her convalescent master of Lockwood. The inner boundaries consist of the Earnshaw Linton interactions with the Heathcliff - Catherine relationship at its core. The narrator are framers. They encompass a story within a boundary and at the same time they leave certain things out of the frame. Nelly and Lockwood keep surfacing as narrators in the text to remind the readers that the tale is theirs; which makes the reader constantly aware of the idea that there are things beyond the boundaries of the Nelly- Lockwood tale. So the question that we must now face is: Whose story are we reading in the text: Heathcliff - Catherine's or Lockwood - Nelly's ? It seems that we can never really know Heathcliff - Catherine's relationship because they are not the narrators (except for Catherine's diary notes). To conclude, it can be said that Nelly - Lockwood can only impose meaning and sense, whereas Heathcliff - Catherine negate meaning and sense.

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