COMMENT
ON THE NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE OF WUTHERING HEIGHTS.
Various
modes of narrating a Story :_ There are various modes of telling a story in which
the most common and most familiar which
are mainly presented by the authors are the first person narrative method, the
third person narrative method and the
‘Epistolary’ or ‘Documentary’ method. In the ‘Third Person’ narrative method,
the author Supplies all the information about the Characters and incidents,
although he is not a participant. Unlike the ‘Third Person’ narrative method,
in the ‘First Person’ narrative method the story is related not by the author
himself, but by a Character inside the story. The remaining one is the method
of narrating a story through letters Written by Characters inside the Story to
one another. This method is called the ‘Epistolary’ or ‘Documentary’ method.
Complicated
narrative method by Emily Bronte in Wuthering Heights: - The narrative method which Emile Bronte has
employed in her novel Wuthering Heights is Complex and complicated. The story
is related mostly by a character, Nelly Dean, a Servant in the two families presented
in the novel. She was an eyewitness of most of the incidents occurring in the
novel, and she subsequently describes to Mr. Lockwood what she saw and heard.
Obviously the method employed in the novel is narration by character inside the
story, commonly known as the first person narrative method. But if we carefully
analyze the story, we will find that the narrator in the novel is not uniformly
the same person. Though Emile Bronte has employed the narrative method of the
first person; yet the narration passes on from one Character to the other. This
is called the technique of ‘’ narrative at several removes ‘’ which Joseph
Conrad, has very skillfully employed in his novels. Besides, introducing the
letters to develop the story, she has also employed the ‘’Documentary’’ also
known as ‘’Epistolary’’ method, first employed by Richardson in his novels.
