Reaction Paper on "Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte"

Reaction Paper 4 pages (1283 words) Sources: 0

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte is an exciting story replete with love, passion, marriages, births and funerals. The way in which the story is told, Nelly Dean telling the story to Mr. Lockwood who then in turn tells it to us, may seem to remove the reader from the story, but it does not; and though the narrator is removed from the story as he hasn't even met some of the characters involved, this does not take away from our interest in Catherine and Hindley Earnshaw, Heathcliff, Edgar and Isabella Linton, and the children in the story. Because Mr. Lockwood doesn't know first-hand the story of these characters, sometimes there is the feeling that everything he is saying is purely tentative, but the contrary seems to happen through this circumlocution. The reader is constantly made aware of how little is known and thus the reader is also intrigued by the complexity of the abstraction.

Bronte uses a lot of symbolism in Wuthering Heights. Ghosts are consistently being used in the story, giving the narrative a supernatural tone at times. The weather is another symbol in the book - such as intense winds at the Heights and the storm when Mr. Earnshaw dies, when Heathcliff goes away from Wuthering Heights, and also when Heathcliff dies. Heathcliff removes Catherine's locket in which a lock of Edgar's hair resides from her dead body. He later replaces it with his own hair, as he believes that Catherine always belonged to him. Nelly then takes Edgar's hair and weaves in with Heathcliff's hair, and puts it back in the locket, signifying the way in which their lives were part of one another. Windows and doors are yet another symbol in the book in that they are always locked (e.g. Mr. "Lockwood" arriving at Wuthering Heights finds the doors locked, Nelly and Catherine locked in rooms,). Other times, there are windows left open and coffins that are opened (i.e. Heathcliff and Catherine's so they can come together in death).

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a thrilling narrative that is at once engaging as well as controversial in terms of some of the novels themes -- religion and class, for example. The first part of the novel "The History of a Family" can be read like the strangest psychological case study of a family, as if it were plucked directly from a filing cabinet in the basement of a mental health institution. The history told to the reader is intriguing, peculiar and at the same time rather poetical. The style of language Dostoyevsky uses in this first part of the narrative is simple, lacking any flights of fancy or elaborations, yet there is something so simply poignant about it that the reader flows through the opening with ease and enjoyment.

The novel is at once harmonious and chaotic in its tale of the weakening of a family. The parricide of Fyodor Karamazov is not only about his death but it is a metaphor for the immoral nature of the entire Karamazov family.

The narration in The Brothers Karamazov achieves almost the same kind of polyphony as in Bronte's Wuthering Heights with its variety of narrators. Dostoyevsky seems to use the multiple styles and narrations in his work in order to draw the reader into the story and into each and every psychology of the characters. Through his use of polyphony narration (or omniscient narration), the reader is able to see that Dostoyevsky is not only a master storyteller, but he is also a pretty good psychologist.

Reading The Brothers Karamazov, the reader is also able to see how Dostoyevsky, again like Bronte, uses "doubles." In Wuthering Heights we see it in the characters (always as doubles), the double type of narration, and in the ghosts serving as in the present as a representation of the past.… READ MORE

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