Lockwood the Liar: a Call to ReconsiderWuthering Heightsas a Metafictional Work on the Limits of Narrative

Wuthering Heights is full of hints that Lockwood could not possibly know everything that he narrates: he stretches our belief in the abilities of human memory and his rendering of outside sources reminds us that he is doing more creative writing than recording. I think this reveals that Wuthering Heights is a novel about writing, a metafiction, and that there is a secondary aim of the book: by showing that the process of narrating must lead to fabricating, the novel calls into question the mimetic abilities of fiction and, ultimately, the usefulness of narrative as a mode to transmit knowledge.