32 pages • 1 hour read
Brokeback Mountain
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Literary Devices
Naturalism
Proulx’s approach to the characters and the world they live in is naturalistic. The characters’ surroundings—their environment, their family, their society, etc.—determine to a large extent the direction their lives take and the experiences they have. Both Ennis and Jack are uneducated and come from struggling families on “small, poor ranches” (256). Ennis was also orphaned at an early age. These conditions—poverty, lack of familial support, lack of education, a culture that condemns their sexual relationship—shape the characters in ways they are never able to escape. While the story ends with the small triumph of Ennis finally accepting his relationship with Jack, the world within which he lives is still harsh and unsupportive. As is often the case, the story’s naturalism intertwines with a sense of Powerlessness and Loss of Hope.
Setting and Imagery
The story’s setting is Wyoming, and its imagery focuses mostly on the backcountry where Ennis and Jack repeatedly find each other. Proulx’s descriptions capture both the brutality of the land and its beauty. A description of “a lightning storm on the mountain the year before that killed forty-two sheep” comes shortly before an image of “banded pebbles and crumbs of soil cast[ing] sudden pencil-long shadows and rearing lodgepole pines below them massed in slabs of somber malachite” (257, 258).
Proulx also uses detailed imagery in her characterization, as in this description of Ennis: “Ennis, high-arched nose and narrow face, was scruffy and a little cave-chested, balanced a small torso on long, caliper legs, possessed a muscular and supple body made for the horse and for fighting” (258). Like the landscape imagery, the descriptions of the men convey not only their physical appearance, but also their essential nature.
Syntax and Style
Proulx writes in long sentences with minimal punctuation. This style reflects the unyielding nature of the land and the onrush of obstacles the characters face. When the two men spend their first night on the mountain, Proulx’s long, detailed-filled sentence carries the reader along with the same momentum the characters feel as they open themselves to each other:
They had a high-time supper by the fire, a can of beans each, fried potatoes, and a quart of whiskey on shares, sat with their backs against a log, boot soles and copper jeans rivets hot, swapping the bottle while the lavender sky emptied of color and the chill air drained down, drinking, smoking cigarettes, getting up every now and then to piss, firelight throwing a sparkle in the arched stream, tossing sticks on the fire to keep the talk going, talking horses and rodeo, roughstock events, wrecks and injuries sustained, the submarine Thresher lost two months earlier with all hands and how it must have been in the last doomed minutes, dogs each had owned and known, the military service, Jack’s home ranch, where his father and mother held on, Ennis’s family place, folded years ago after his folks died, the older brother in Signal and a married sister in Casper (260).
Proulx punctuates her long sentences with short, often incomplete sentences that ring like exclamation marks. She begins the paragraph that marks the beginning of the characters’ sexual relationship with, “As it did go” (262). This clipped syntax mimics the characters’ response to the development, which is to accept but not discuss it.
Diction and Colloquialism
The characters speak in a vernacular shaped by time, place, and their personal circumstances, and Proulx employs misspellings and incomplete sentences to capture the characters’ voices—e.g., “Happy to switch but give you warnin I can’t cook worth a shit” (259), or “I ain’t never goin a be on the bubble” (268). She juxtaposes this vernacular with the voice of a sophisticated, well-spoken, and neutral narrator—e.g., “A slow corrosion worked between Ennis and Alma” (271). Sometimes the narrator combines the vernacular with the sophisticated, as in this passage describing the birth of Ennis’s first daughter: “[T]heir bedroom was full of the smell of old blood and milk and baby shit, and the sounds were of squalling and sucking and Alma’s sleepy groans, all reassuring of fecundity and life’s continuance to one who worked with livestock” (264). This varied diction works in tandem with the story’s naturalism, providing an objective picture of the characters’ immersion in their environment.
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By Annie Proulx
