Plot Summary
In the final chapter of Wuthering Heights, Nelly Dean describes Heathcliff's last days. After avoiding the household for several days, Heathcliff disappears one night and returns the next morning in a state of strange, wild joy. Catherine and Hareton note his unusual brightness, and Nelly observes that he trembles with excitement, his eyes glittering with an almost supernatural intensity.
Despite sitting down to meals, Heathcliff cannot bring himself to eat. He tells Nelly that he was "on the threshold of hell" the night before but is now "within sight of my heaven." He asks to be left alone and seems to gaze at something invisible to everyone else—something that communicates both pleasure and pain in extreme measure. His abstinence from food continues for four days, during which he grows increasingly agitated and consumed by an unseen presence.
During one restless night, Heathcliff tells Nelly to send for Mr. Green, the lawyer, to draft his will, though he cannot decide how to leave his property. He gives instructions for his burial: he is to be carried to the churchyard in the evening and laid beside Catherine Earnshaw, with the sexton following specific directions about the two coffins. When Nelly suggests he send for a minister, Heathcliff dismisses organized religion entirely, declaring he has nearly attained his own heaven and cares nothing for the conventional one.
The following evening, after heavy rain, Nelly finds Heathcliff's window swinging open and discovers him dead on his back, his face washed with rain and wearing a fierce, exultant expression that she cannot close from his eyes. The doctor, Mr. Kenneth, cannot determine the cause of death. Nelly conceals the fact that Heathcliff had not eaten for four days.
Heathcliff is buried as he wished, beside Catherine, with only Nelly, Hareton, the sexton, and six pallbearers in attendance. Hareton—the one Heathcliff wronged most—grieves most deeply, weeping by the corpse all night and laying green sods over the grave himself. The neighborhood soon buzzes with ghost stories: a little boy claims to have seen Heathcliff and a woman on the moor, and old Joseph insists he has seen two figures at the chamber window on rainy nights.
Nelly tells Mr. Lockwood that Hareton and young Catherine plan to marry on New Year’s Day and move to Thrushcross Grange. Lockwood departs and walks to the kirkyard, where he finds the three headstones—Catherine’s, Edgar Linton’s, and Heathcliff’s—on the slope by the moor. In the novel’s famous closing lines, he watches moths among the heath and harebells and wonders "how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."
Analysis
Chapter 34 resolves the novel’s central tension between obsessive love and earthly existence. Heathcliff’s mysterious joy and inability to eat signal that the boundary between the living and the dead has dissolved for him. His declaration that he is "within sight of my heaven" reveals a personal cosmology built entirely around Catherine—he has no interest in Christian salvation, only in reunion with her. The "fancied object" he gazes at throughout the chapter, invisible to Nelly yet powerfully present, suggests Catherine’s ghost has come for him at last.
The open window through which rain pours onto Heathcliff’s body is a potent symbol, recalling Catherine’s ghost at the window in Chapter 3 and representing the permeable boundary between life and death, civilization and wildness. That Heathcliff dies with an expression of exultation—eyes that will not shut, lips frozen in a sneer—leaves deliberately ambiguous whether he has achieved bliss or damnation.
Brontë uses Hareton’s grief to complicate the reader’s judgment of Heathcliff. Despite being systematically degraded by Heathcliff, Hareton alone mourns him with genuine sorrow, demonstrating the generous heart that makes him worthy of the "second chance" romance with young Catherine. Their planned marriage and move to Thrushcross Grange symbolize the restoration of natural order and the triumph of a gentler, healthier love over the destructive passion of the previous generation.
The novel’s final image—Lockwood at the three graves beneath a benign sky, with moths and soft wind—offers a vision of transcendent peace, yet it is characteristically ambiguous. The country folk’s ghost stories and the little boy’s terror suggest the dead may not rest so quietly after all. Brontë leaves it to the reader to decide whether Heathcliff and Catherine have found each other beyond the grave or whether only the quiet earth remains.