What is Brokeback Mountain about?
Brokeback Mountain is a short story by Annie Proulx, first published in The New Yorker on October 13, 1997, and later collected in Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999). It tells the story of Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist, two young men who meet in the summer of 1963 while working together as sheepherders on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. They fall in love, but neither of them has the language or the social permission to understand what has happened to them. When the summer ends they go their separate ways — Ennis marries his girlfriend Alma, Jack marries a rodeo rider named Lureen — and spend the next twenty years meeting a few times a year on fishing trips that are, in fact, the times when they can be themselves with each other. The story follows them from 1963 to the early 1980s, covering the arc of a love affair that neither man can acknowledge or abandon. Brokeback Mountain became widely known after Ang Lee's 2005 film adaptation, which won three Academy Awards including Best Director. The story is approximately 55 pages.
What genre is Brokeback Mountain?
Brokeback Mountain is literary short fiction — a story that Annie Proulx has described as a story about people's inability to say what they feel and the cost of that silence. It belongs to the tradition of Western American literature in its landscape and its characters (ranchers, rodeo riders, working-class men in rural Wyoming) while also being a love story and a tragedy. It is sometimes classified as LGBT fiction because of its subject matter, but Proulx has resisted the reduction of the story to a story about gay men: it is, she has said, a story about two people who fall in love and cannot be together, set in a landscape and a culture that offers them no way to acknowledge what they have. The story's tragedy is not primarily about sexuality but about constraint — about the gap between what people feel and what they are allowed to express.
How long is Brokeback Mountain?
Brokeback Mountain summary
In the summer of 1963, Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist are both nineteen years old and looking for work. They are hired to tend sheep on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming — Ennis to watch the herd on the mountain, Jack to camp at the base — and they spend the summer living and working in close proximity on a mountain that is remote from everything they know.
The two men are very different. Ennis is quiet, closed-off, raised rough, not given to talk. Jack is more outgoing, more comfortable with longing, more willing to name what he wants. Over the course of the summer, their relationship becomes physical, and then becomes more than physical — though neither man has the words for what it is or what to do about it.
When the summer ends they go their separate ways. Ennis and Alma get married. Jack and Lureen get married. Ennis gets work as a ranch hand. Jack goes into the rodeo circuit and eventually works for his father-in-law's farm equipment business.
Four years pass. Jack sends Ennis a postcard saying he is coming through. Ennis meets him on the street outside his apartment. The story describes what happens in a single sentence that has become one of the most quoted passages in American short fiction: they seize each other by the shoulders and kiss in the stairwell, and Alma sees.
After that reunion, Ennis and Jack begin meeting a few times a year, calling the trips fishing trips. Alma knows what they are and says nothing. The marriage deteriorates and eventually ends in divorce. Jack, who is more willing to imagine a different life, suggests at one point that they could get a ranch together, live together openly. Ennis refuses — he explains, obliquely, what happened to a gay man he knew as a child who was beaten to death. He is afraid. He will not risk it.
The story follows them through their forties — Ennis working seasonal ranch jobs, Jack farming in Texas. Their meetings become rarer. In one of their last encounters, Ennis is uncharacteristically emotional: "I wish I knew how to quit you," Jack tells him.
Then Ennis receives a postcard he has sent to Jack, returned with "DECEASED" on the envelope. He calls Lureen, who tells him Jack died in an accident — a tire blew up while he was changing it, and the rim hit him in the face. Ennis does not believe this explanation.
He drives to Jack's parents' house, where he asks to take Jack's ashes to Brokeback Mountain. Jack's mother tells him that Jack had always wanted to be buried there. Jack's father refuses to allow it — the ashes will stay in the family plot.
In Jack's old room, Ennis finds, in the closet, two shirts: his own old plaid shirt, which he had assumed was lost in some laundry years ago, and Jack's shirt from the summer on Brokeback Mountain. Jack had stolen Ennis's shirt and kept it all those years, sleeved inside his own shirt, the two shirts nested together as the two men could not be.
How does Brokeback Mountain end?
Characters in Brokeback Mountain
Ennis Del Mar — Quiet, physically strong, deeply closed-off, raised in poverty after his parents' early deaths. He is the character who cannot bring himself to imagine a different life even when Jack offers him one. His fear is specific and has a name — he saw what happened to a gay man in his community when he was a child.
Jack Twist — More open, more willing to name what he wants, more capable of imagining alternatives. He comes from a difficult family situation (his father is contemptuous of him) and has spent his life looking for something he cannot find in rodeo circuits or his marriage. He is the one who says "I wish I knew how to quit you."
Alma — Ennis's wife, who sees what happens between Ennis and Jack on the street outside their apartment and says nothing for years. When she finally speaks it is at a dinner, years after their divorce, and Ennis barely responds.
Lureen — Jack's wife, a confident woman whose family's money and farm equipment business define the life Jack lives in Texas. When she tells Ennis how Jack died, Ennis hears something in her voice that he cannot interpret.
Quotes from Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx
Annie Proulx writes Brokeback Mountain's most resonant lines in the laconic, precise voice of the Wyoming landscape — the fewest possible words carrying the most possible weight.
"I wish I knew how to quit you."
"There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can't fix it you've got to stand it."
"He pressed his face into the fabric and breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty sweet stink of Jack but there was no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands."
Frequently asked questions
Is Brokeback Mountain a book or a short story?
Brokeback Mountain is a short story, approximately 55 pages. It was first published in The New Yorker on October 13, 1997, and later collected in Annie Proulx's short story collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999). In 2005, Scribner published it as a standalone illustrated book to coincide with the release of Ang Lee's film adaptation. Many readers encounter it as a standalone book, but it is technically a story within a collection rather than a novel. Annie Proulx is known for her novels (The Shipping News, Accordion Crimes) but her short fiction — particularly the Wyoming stories — is widely considered among her finest work.
How does the Brokeback Mountain movie compare to the story?
Ang Lee's 2005 film, with a screenplay by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, is considered one of the most faithful and successful literary adaptations in recent cinema. The film follows the story closely, expanding some scenes and adding visual detail that the compressed prose leaves implicit. The casting of Heath Ledger as Ennis and Jake Gyllenhaal as Jack is widely considered definitive — Ledger in particular was praised for his embodiment of Ennis's closed-off physicality. The film won three Academy Awards (Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score) and was nominated for Best Picture, which it did not win in one of the most controversial Oscar decisions of recent years. Proulx has expressed satisfaction with the adaptation.
What is the meaning of the shirts in Brokeback Mountain?
The shirts are the story's most powerful image. Ennis discovers, in Jack's old room, that Jack had kept a shirt Ennis assumed was lost — his own plaid shirt, stolen by Jack after their summer on Brokeback Mountain — nested inside Jack's own shirt from that summer. The two shirts, sleeves worked down into each other, are an image of the life Ennis and Jack could not have: together, nested, inseparable. Jack kept them for twenty years, in his childhood bedroom, because the shirts were what he had of the time when he and Ennis were actually together. Ennis takes the shirts home and hangs them in his closet, and the story ends with him holding them — the two skins, as Proulx calls them, that are all that remain.
Was Brokeback Mountain based on a true story?
Brokeback Mountain is fiction, but Annie Proulx has said that it is rooted in her observations of the Wyoming landscape and the men who work it. She was living in Wyoming while writing Close Range and had observed the particular silence of men who work alone in remote country — the things they cannot say. The story is not based on any specific individuals. Proulx has also said that after the film's release she received many letters from gay men in rural America who told her the story was true in a broader sense — that the specific impossibility Ennis and Jack face was their own experience.
What does "I wish I knew how to quit you" mean?
"I wish I knew how to quit you" is Jack's line to Ennis in one of their later meetings, delivered during an argument about whether they could make a different life together. Jack has been pushing for more — more time, a shared future, something beyond a few fishing trips a year — and Ennis has been refusing. The line is Jack's acknowledgment that he cannot stop loving Ennis despite the pain of the relationship, and that he cannot get Ennis to change. It has become one of the most quoted lines in American short fiction and a popular cultural shorthand for the experience of loving someone you cannot have or cannot quit.
What other books are similar to Brokeback Mountain?
Readers who respond to Brokeback Mountain's compressed, lyrical account of impossible love in the American West often also read Annie Proulx's other Wyoming stories in Close Range, particularly "The Half-Skinned Steer." For other literary accounts of gay love under social constraint, Michael Cunningham's A Home at the End of the World and E.M. Forster's Maurice (written in 1913 but not published until 1971, because Forster knew it could not be published in his lifetime) are frequently paired with Proulx's story. Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping and Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier share the Western/Southern landscape and the emotional register of love shaped by silence and loss.
Related summaries
Dark Matter
Blake Crouch
Dark Matter is a science fiction thriller by Blake Crouch, published on July 26, 2016. It follows Jason Dessen, a physics professor at a small college in Chicago who gave up a prom...
The Testaments
Margaret Atwood
The Testaments is a novel by Margaret Atwood, published on September 10, 2019, and the sequel to The Handmaid's Tale (1985). While The Handmaid's Tale is narrated entirely by Offre...
Piranesi
Susanna Clarke
Piranesi is a novel by Susanna Clarke, published on September 15, 2020. It is narrated through the journals of a man who calls himself Piranesi and who lives inside an infinite Hou...