Unreliable narration is often taught using first-person narrators who lie or misunderstand their own situation, but Wuthering Heights offers a subtler case: narrators who may be honest by their own account yet still limited, biased, or working from incomplete information. This distinction is worth making explicit before students attempt to write about it.

Nelly Dean is not malicious, but she is a servant with her own investment in how events unfold, and her narration reflects her own judgments about characters she has strong feelings toward. Students should be pushed to identify specific moments where her framing seems to favor one character's perspective over another's.

Lockwood, meanwhile, is an outsider who misreads the social dynamics at Wuthering Heights almost immediately upon arrival, and his early misunderstandings offer a useful, lower-stakes entry point for teaching unreliability before moving into Nelly's more consequential biases later in the novel.

It helps to distinguish reliability from honesty explicitly in class discussion, since a narrator can be telling the truth as they understand it while still being unreliable due to limited access to other characters' thoughts, motivations, or private conversations they were not present for.

Building the Argument for Unreliability

A strong essay on this topic needs specific textual evidence of where a narrator's account seems shaped by bias rather than simple assertion that narration in general cannot be trusted. Students should be able to point to a moment where Nelly's judgment of a character shifts noticeably or contradicts information available elsewhere in the text.

• Identify specific moments where a narrator's judgment appears biased
• Distinguish between a narrator being dishonest and simply limited
• Consider what information a narrator could not have witnessed firsthand
• Compare how differently two narrators frame the same event
• Avoid claiming unreliability without pointing to a specific textual example

Common Missteps in Student Writing

Students sometimes overcorrect once they grasp the concept of unreliable narration, dismissing everything Nelly Dean says as suspect without distinguishing between moments of clear bias and moments where she is simply reporting events she witnessed directly. This flattening undermines the more precise argument the essay should be making.

Another common misstep is treating unreliability as a flaw in the novel rather than a deliberate authorial choice, missing the opportunity to argue what Brontë gains thematically by filtering the story through biased perspectives rather than an omniscient narrator.

Connecting Unreliability to Broader Themes

Strong essays often connect the narrative unreliability to the novel's broader resistance to moral judgment, arguing that readers cannot fully condemn or excuse characters like Heathcliff precisely because the information reaching them has already been filtered and shaped by biased narrators.

This connection between structure and theme tends to distinguish essays that earn the highest marks from those that identify unreliability accurately but treat it as a purely technical observation disconnected from the novel's larger meaning.

Assessing This Type of Essay

Grading criteria for unreliable narrator essays should specifically reward students who connect structural observations to thematic significance, rather than crediting essays that simply catalog examples of bias without explaining why that bias matters to the novel's overall effect.

Because this topic requires a fairly sophisticated understanding of narrative structure, it works especially well as a later-unit essay assignment, once students have already built familiarity with the frame narrative through earlier, lower-stakes discussion and writing.