32 pages • 1 hour read
Brokeback Mountain
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Character Analysis
Ennis del Mar
Content Warning: This section references child abuse and anti-gay bias.
Ennis is the protagonist of the story and the character whose thoughts and feelings the omniscient narrator most often explicates. He is described initially as having “ragged hair, […] big nicked hands, […] jeans torn, [and a] button-gaping shirt” (257). Later in his life, the narrator observes that “a benign growth appeared on his eyelid and gave it a drooping appearance, a broken nose healed and crooked” (273). His physical characteristics and behavior show a man defeated early in life; the first paragraph reveals that his older brother and sister raised Ennis in poverty after their parents died in a wreck, “leaving them twenty-four dollars in cash and a two-mortgage ranch” (256). Another early blow prevented Ennis from reaching for a different life. He applied for a hardship license at 14 so he could continue going to school in their beat-up pickup, but the car broke down shortly afterward.
In his relationship with Jack, Ennis is the realist. He understands more clearly than Jack that the world won’t allow them to find happiness together, but he is resigned to his lot in life and tries not to be bitter about it. Alternatively, Ennis may simply find it easier to live a life of compromise because he has more thoroughly absorbed society’s heteronormativity. His marriage to Alma, while ending in divorce, is not portrayed as too difficult for Ennis. They have sex, and the marriage produces two daughters whom he cares about, but the emotional bond is clearly weak. Ennis ultimately proves to be a dynamic character; his visit Jack’s parents at the end of the story and the building of his small shrine to Jack illustrate his development. Though not a major shift, these actions convey new willingness to admit to himself who he is and whom he loves.
Jack Twist
Jack is the other main character in the story. Like Ennis, he is a product of poverty, and the first description the story provides of Jack encompasses both men: “both high-school drop-out country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life” (256). Jack’s parents are still living, but other than visiting about once a year to help with ranch work, he has little contact with them. The nature of Jack’s relationship with his father is captured by an early event in Jack’s life: His father, upset that three or four-year-old Jack had urinated accidently on the floor of the bathroom, first whipped him with his belt and then urinated on the young boy. When this happened, Jack saw that he was circumcised and his father was not, and that image stayed with him his whole life: “[W]hile he was hosin me down I seen he had some extra material that I was missin. I seen they’d cut me different like you’d crop a ear or scorch a brand. No way to get it right with him after that” (282).
That this perceived mutilation is hidden under Jack’s clothes echoes other descriptions of Jack’s appearance:
At first glance Jack seemed fair enough, with his curly hair and quick laugh, but for a small man he carried some weight in the haunch and his smile disclosed buckteeth, not pronounced enough to let him eat popcorn out of the neck of a jug, but noticeable (257).
Jack is haunted by his looks and takes steps to hide his supposed deficiencies as he grows older, “fill[ing] out through the shoulders and hams” (273), and “[having] his front teeth filed down and capped, […] and to finish the job [growing] a heavy mustache” (274).
These self-conscious actions are in line with Jack’s outlook on life: He is a dreamer who wants things to be better than they are. Throughout the story, he proposes that he and Ennis run off and start a life together. He wants more than Ennis can give, as is clear from his decision to start a relationship with another man after he and Ennis last meet—a relationship that Ennis believes got him killed.
Alma del Mar
Alma is married to Ennis and is a minor character. They have two daughters together, and she embodies Ennis’s desire to lead the life heteronormative culture demands of him. She seems to love him, and when faced with his relationship with Jack, she keeps quiet for much of the story. Like society, however, she disapproves of their relationship and sets up subtle traps for them.
Despite her prejudice, Alma is in her own way a tragic figure. She too has dreams of a life with Ennis—a real home and emotional intimacy—that never are realized. She finds their sex life difficult because of his preference for anal sex, and she becomes the image of a long-suffering wife. It is only years after Alma and Jack divorce that Alma becomes a woman able to speak about what she knows. While Alma’s arc is not central to the story, her role as Ennis’s heteronormative consciousness is important, and her evolution from being silent to speaking the truth foreshadows Ennis’s own quiet evolution.
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