Emotional Desolation in Brokeback Mountain Liz Small 11th Grade

In the unforgiving austerity of the Wyoming plains, two men, liberated from the confines of society, find love in a time and place where their passion has dire consequences. In the short story “Brokeback Mountain” by Annie Proulx, the main character, Ennis Del Mar, is an orphan who left High School to make a living as a ranch hand. He falls in love with Jack Twist, a more sociable and animated man whose “ideas... never come to pass”. The two love each other intensely and always recalled the season they spent together on Brokeback Mountain while working for a cattle rancher. Years later, when Ennis finds out that Jack has died, his heart breaks and he constantly dreams of the days and nights he and Jack were together. While the storyline itself is thought-provoking, the techniques used by Proulx help create a profoundly emotional and poignant story in just a few short pages. Short stories are different than novels and each author has his/her own way to create the most well-rounded story in only a limited amount of pages. Wallace Stegner, author of the novels Angle of Repose and Big Rock Candy Mountain, as well as several collections of short stories, believed that all well written short stories have similar properties. Proulx...