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Lockwood—The Narrator
Lockwood along with Nelly Dean is the principal narrator of Wuthering Heights. Lockwood gives us the impersonal objective view in the novel. While Nelly gives us the insider's view.
In many respects he stands for the reader. As an outsider on his first visit to the Heights, he fails to understand the strange people living there and their relationship to one another. We learn along with Lockwood about the various characters. He correctly foreshadows the curiosity of the reader in the questions that he puts to Heathcliff and later to Nelly in order to elicit information.
A Contrast to the Rustic Characters
Lockwood is unlike the other characters in the novel, who are all part of the Yorkshire moors. Lockwood, on the other hand is a man from the city who soon tires of the country life, he is fond of books and dislikes a showy display of feelings. We know little about his background and education, though, like the Lintons, he is soft, a man of sentimental impulses, though not of passions. He appears to see himself as a romantic hero and the only incident of his past life he chooses to tell us is that of his encounter with 'a most fascinating creature, a real goddess' (Chapter 1). He is not a man who easily understands the characters of others and his first judgment of Heathcliff is definitely faulty. He imagines he could have made a match with Catherine:
What a realization of something more romantic than a fairy tale it would have been for Mrs. Linton Heathcliff, had she and I struck up an attachment...and migrated together; into the striking atmosphere of the town! and is jealous when Hareton wins her in the end.