Brokeback Mountain

The shirts hanging in Jack’s childhood closet, one fitted within the other, symbolize his and Ennis’s love for each other and its secrecy. Jack’s mother preserves his boyhood room after his death, and when Ennis explores it, he finds Jack’s shirt from the summer on Brokeback tucked in an out-of-the-way corner. The shirt has Ennis’s dried blood on the sleeve, released when Jack’s knee “slammed Ennis’s nose” during “their contortionistic grappling and wrestling” (283), and Jack has slipped Ennis’s shirt inside his own. That shirt is dirty, with a ripped pocket and missing buttons, but the clothing’s very imperfections mirror those of the couple, who nevertheless remain “like two skins, one inside the other, two in one” (283).

When Ennis smells the shirts, he hopes to find a scented reminder of their time together but does not—another nod to the impossibility of returning to that summer. Nevertheless, Ennis takes the shirts and hangs them in his trailer under a postcard picture of Brokeback Mountain, making a private shrine to their love. 

The story’s backdrop of the Wyoming landscape, from the mountains to the plains, symbolizes the struggles Ennis and Jack face. When the men first approach the mountain where they will set up camp and where their love affair will begin, they “flowed up the trail like dirty water through the timber and out above the tree line into the great flowery meadows and coursing, endless wind” (258). This endless wind symbolizes the forces that buffet their lives. When Jack and Ennis stand together one night on Brokeback Mountain, the world around them is just as unforgiving as the culture they are escaping from: “the fire, its burning tossing ruddy chunks of light, the shadow of their bodies a single column against the rock […] the sticks in the fire setting into coals” (278). Even the meetings they have over the years unfold against the harsh conditions of the landscape and their lives. Jack, dissatisfied with both, complains, “And why’s it we’re always in the friggin cold weather? We ought a do something. We out a go south” (276). Ennis quickly dismisses the suggestion as impractical, underscoring the connection between the story’s setting and the theme of Powerlessness and Loss of Hope.