Unreliability and Anticipation in Wuthering Heights Anonymous 12th Grade

Emily Bronte’s literary dexterity heightens both the inhumanity and passion of her lurid tale, in that she does not tell it herself. Rather, it is the act of storytelling from the words of Lockwood and Nelly that serves as the basis of the intricate discourse of Wuthering Heights. That every phrase of the novel is in the words of a character ensures that Bronte places readers into a state of prolepsis, yet readers are constantly kept in suspense through the fact of the narrators’ unreliability. Nonetheless, along with the numerous perspectives of other characters, in the form of diaries or letters, Bronte utilises such as narrative structure as a vehicle through which she creates an exigency of her characters’ pasts. The plot, divided into two parts – the second, superimposed upon the first – creates a sense of claustrophobia within the novel; thus, like Lockwood himself, the reader is left in a cluster of confusion, shock, and mystery, but most significantly reads on with an eagerness for the narrative to unfold.

The reader does not initially find himself or herself drawn to the alluringly dangerous world of the novel, as it is presented through the foolish eyes of Lockwood. There is an explicit criticism of the class system...