Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

Beginner writers are often stumped by the momentous question of point of view. Which character should narrate the story? Should the narrative voice be third-person omniscient or first person? Prose offers her own experience as a novice writer as a solution. She wrote her first novel as a story within a short story. The device of the framed story forced her to ask not only who was narrating the story, but also who was listening to it. Once she learnt to identify the listener, the audience of a story, the question of the narrator became easier. In British novelist Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847), the story of star-crossed lovers Cathy and Heathcliff is being told to Mr. Lockwood, who is renting Heathcliff’s mysterious property. Lockwood, an outsider, becomes the stand-in for the reader. He asks Nelly, Heathcliff’s housekeeper, to tell him Heathcliff’s story. Nelly is a good narrator because while she has observed Heathcliff and Cathy’s history firsthand, she is not directly involved in their tragedy.

The narrative structure of Wuthering Heights is thus based on an artifice, but the reader accommodates the artifice because of the power of the narrative.