I have a single wish, and my whole being and faculties are yearning to attain it.

Heathcliff's declaration, "I have a single wish, and my whole being and faculties are yearning to attain it," is the distilled essence of his character in the final phase of his life. Spoken to Nelly Dean in the kitchen of Wuthering Heights during the last days before his death, the sentence reveals that the ferocious engine of revenge, which had powered him for nearly two decades, has been replaced by a single, transcendent desire: to be with Catherine Earnshaw. It is the verbal key to his strange, ecstatic, and ultimately fatal final days.

The Origin of the Wish

The roots of this single wish lie in the earliest formation of Heathcliff's identity. Brought to Wuthering Heights as a starving, ragged, black-haired child from the streets of Liverpool, he was immediately set apart. Mr. Earnshaw, the old master, took to him strangely, petting him up far above his own children, which bred bad feeling in the house from the very beginning. This early favoritism, combined with the savage persecution he suffered from Hindley Earnshaw after the old man's death, forged in Heathcliff a sense of being a usurper and an outcast, but also a profound, unbreakable bond with Catherine. She was his sole ally, his teacher, his other self. When Catherine declared to Nelly, "I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind, not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being," she articulated the very foundation of his soul. The wish to be reunited with her is not a romantic fancy; it is a drive to restore the integrity of his own being.

The Wish as a Substitute for Revenge

For years after Catherine's death, Heathcliff's conscious project was revenge. He systematically degraded Hindley, reduced Hareton Earnshaw to a brutish, unlettered servant in his own house, and manipulated the marriage of the younger Catherine to his own sickly son, Linton Heathcliff, to gain control of Thrushcross Grange. Yet even as he executed this plan, a different force was at work. He confessed to Nelly that he had lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction. The sight of Hareton and the younger Catherine together, their eyes so precisely similar to Catherine Earnshaw's, disarmed him. He realized that his violent exertions had come to an absurd termination: "I get levers and mattocks to demolish the two houses, and train myself to be capable of working like Hercules, and when everything is ready and in my power, I find the will to lift a slate off either roof has vanished!" The wish to destroy had been consumed by the single, overwhelming wish to join Catherine.

The Consuming Nature of the Wish

This single wish became a physical and psychological force that devoured his existence. He told Nelly, "I have a single wish, and my whole being and faculties are yearning to attain it. They have yearned towards it so long, and so unwaveringly, that I'm convinced it will be reached—and soon—because it has devoured my existence: I am swallowed up in the anticipation of its fulfilment." This was not a passive hope but an active, agonizing hunger. He stopped eating, not out of a deliberate plan to starve himself, but because the wish had made food irrelevant. He described the sensation as being like a man struggling in the water, unable to rest until he reaches the shore. The entire world became a dreadful collection of memoranda that Catherine had existed and that he had lost her. Every cloud, every tree, the very flags on the floor, all bore her image. His soul's bliss was killing his body, but it could not satisfy itself.

The Fulfillment of the Wish

The wish reached its culmination in the final days of Heathcliff's life. He began to exhibit an unnatural, joyful glitter in his eyes, a bloodless hue, and a strange smile that terrified Nelly. He claimed to be within sight of his heaven, with hardly three feet to sever him from it. On the night of his death, he locked himself in the oak-panelled bedchamber where Catherine's ghost had appeared to Lockwood. When Nelly found him the next morning, he was dead, laid on his back, his eyes open with a frightful, life-like gaze of exultation. His parted lips and sharp white teeth seemed to sneer, but it was the sneer of triumph. The single wish had been attained. He was buried, as he had instructed, not beside the Lintons but on the green slope near the moor, and the country folk swear that his ghost, along with Catherine's, still walks the moors and the house. The wish that had consumed his life was finally, irrevocably, fulfilled.