Storytellers

While reading the next section of Great Expectations I was drawn to recount a certain aspect of Wuthering Heights. I wanted to point out a connection I noticed about the way in which both of the authors, Dickens and Bronte, choose to tell the stories of the different characters in their books. In Great Expectations, we see a situation where Herbert is talking to Pip in chapter 22, he is telling him the story of Miss Havisham. He tells the story of her life going all the way back to her childhood. When I was reading this section I could not help but think of Wuthering Heights and the role that Nelly serves in the book. She tells the story through her perspective and we almost have to instill a form of trust into her character to believe what she is saying. Bronte and Dickens both choose to tell stories through different characters in their pieces of literature aside from the normal narrators that are telling the story. I was wondering and reread this section a few times to see if this format of relaying the story to the reader changed anything in my perception of the information. I was thinking back the first chapter of Great Expectations when Pip the narrator is the one to tell his story and introduce his background and how this situation differs from the one in which Pip is not the one telling us the story. Pip tells his own story about his childhood in the beginning, yet we see the contrast when Herbert is the one to recount this story. It was interesting to see that multiple novels from the Victorian Era both had such a similar way of telling stories. We spoke briefly about the effect that Nelly’s storytelling had and when reading Wuthering Heights I was interested to see if Great Expectations was similar at all in this matter. Does the fact that Miss Havisham’s story is coming from Herbert take away from the authenticity or does it add to our understanding on the type of person and or character that she is? When the story comes from the perspective of another character, like Nelly and Herbert, how should the reader interpret this?

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.