This is how the story of Emily Brontë's novel, Wuthering Heights, begins. Like most stories, it begins with a beginning. This is a more important point than it may seem: all stories move only in one direction, forward through time. If there is a knowable beginning, that's where they begin. If there is a knowable end, that's where they end. The process of telling is the story's narration, and at this point Ellen (Nelly) Dean, a servant in the household, is its narrator. This distinction between story and narration is also important. It is an implicit acknowledgment that a story is understood as having a separate existence from its narration. As such, it can be told in different ways by different narrators. Were Hindley or Cathy our narrator at this point, the narration of this story would be different, with different words, different emotional inflections, different perspectives, and different details. These narrators might even contradict each other.