ABSTRACT
If the narrative opening in Jane Eyre works to consolidate Jane’s identity in a way that comforts and flatters the reader, that in Wuthering Heights has the opposite effect of confusing and even alienating the reader with Lockwood’s awkwardly intrusive narrative presence, to the point where some readers might even have given up reading. Wuthering Heights is a much more complex novel than Jane Eyre, not least in its narrative complexity and multiple narrators, the first and last of whom, Lockwood, is bewilderingly at odds with the rest of the novel. Of the multiple narrators identified just now, of course Lockwood and Ellen are the principal ones and it’s the startling difference between them as well as the way they are complementarily unreliable and not wholly sympathetic that is so unusual.
