Book Club Guide

Brokeback Mountain

by Annie Proulx · 1997 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

Love that has no name in the world it inhabits
The landscape as the only space where the relationship can exist
What a man sacrifices to keep the world's approval

About this book

Two young Wyoming ranch hands — Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist — herd sheep one summer on Brokeback Mountain and begin a sexual and emotional relationship that neither can acknowledge or abandon, meeting intermittently across two decades in a world that gives them no space for what they are to each other. Proulx's short story is one of the most celebrated pieces of American fiction of the late 20th century.

Published in The New Yorker in 1997 and collected in Close Range (1999), Brokeback Mountain won the National Magazine Award. The film adaptation by Ang Lee (2005) brought it a much larger audience.

Discussion questions

The story covers twenty years of occasional meetings on Brokeback Mountain. How does Proulx show love developing across time and distance — without sentimentalising it?
The setting — rural Wyoming, rodeo and ranch culture — is essential. What does Proulx achieve through this particular landscape and milieu?
Both Ennis and Jack marry women and have children. How does Proulx show the cost of this to their families — and to themselves?
The story ends with a specific act of preservation by Ennis. What is Proulx saying through this ending — about memory, grief, and what remains when everything else is taken?
Brokeback Mountain is a short story. What does the brevity achieve — and what does the story do in twenty pages that a novel could not?