Is Heathcliff a hero or a villain? Explain giving evidence from the story.
Answers
Heathcliff is neither; he is an anti-hero. For, he possesses qualities of the hero: loving, courageous, physically strong, with imperfections such as feeling overpowered by his obsessive and thus selfish love. Heathcliff feels forces him into certain actions, living only to prove his worth to his beloved Cathy. While he becomes the master of his foster brother buying up the old home--and cruelly treating him--Heathcliff remains the slave of his love to Cathy, ever brooding over her, and marries her sister-in-law only to be close to Cathy.
After Cathy dies, Heathcliff does not abandon his love for her, a testimony to the genuineness of his feeling. But, again the love is not heroic. Rather it is yet obsessive: Heathcliff wakes to the ghost of Cathy, he fails to care for himself, living only to be reunited with the woman who gives him his soul.
In a sense Heathcliff is merely a darker side of Catherine who herself is self-centered and fickle. For, does not Catherine at one point in the novel excalim, "Heathcliff is I"?