Brokeback Mountain (Plot Summary)

Plot Summary

Part 1

"Brokeback Mountain" begins in the present with Ennis Del Mar waking up in his trailer parked on the Wyoming ranch where he has been working. He thinks about finding a new job since the owner is ready to sell the ranch and acknowledges that he may have to live with his daughter for a while. This morning, though, he feels happy because he dreamed of Jack Twist the night before and of their time together on Brokeback Mountain.

At this point, the narrative shifts to 1983, when he and Jack were both teenagers during Ennis's first summer on the mountain where they worked as sheep herders. Day after day, Ennis tends the camp while Jack herds the sheep and sleeps out on the mountain with them. One day, when Jack complains about his "commutin four hours a day," he accepts Ennis's offer to switch jobs.

Every evening, they share supper by the campfire, "talking horses and rodeo, roughstock events, wrecks and injuries sustained," and other details of their hard lives in the West. Toward the end of the summer when they shift the camp, the distance Ennis has to ride out to the sheep grows longer and he begins to stay later at the camp at night. One evening, after the two sing drunken songs by the campfire, Ennis decides it is too late to go out to the sheep and so beds down at the campsite. After his shivering wakes Jack, the latter insists that Ennis share his bedroll. Soon after, the two have sex, something Ennis had never done before.

Their sexual activity becomes more frequent in the following days while they both insist that neither of them is "queer." One day the foreman, Joe Aguirre, watches them together through his binoculars. Toward the end of the summer, after Ennis spends an entire night with Jack, the sheep wander off and mix with another group of sheep. Ennis tries unsuccessfully to sort them out. When they come down off the mountain after the first snowfall, Aguirre notes with displeasure that the sheep count is low and the herd is mixed.

When Jack asks Ennis if he is coming back to the mountain the next summer, Ennis tells him that he will be getting married in December and then will try to find work on a ranch. Jack determines to go back home and then maybe to Texas, and the two say an awkward goodbye. As Ennis drives away, his gut wrenches and he retches along the side of the road. He feels "about as bad as he ever had," a feeling that stays with him for a long time.

Part 2

Ennis marries Alma and a year later their child is born. After the ranch where he was working folds, he reluctantly takes work on a road crew. When their second child is born, Alma convinces him to get a place in town so that she will not have to live on any more "lonesome ranches."

Four summers after their first on Brokeback Mountain, Jack visits Ennis. When Jack first arrives, he and Ennis share a passionate embrace, watched by Alma. When Jack meets Alma, he announces that he too is married and has one child. After a few awkward moments, Ennis and Jack leave, pick up a bottle of whiskey and head for a motel where they spend the night together.

They talk of how they missed each other and of Jack's career as a bull rider. Jack suggests that he married his wife, Lureen, because she came from a wealthy family. Ennis admits that he has been thinking about whether he is gay but insists that he is not. He explains that he does not enjoy sex with women, but he has not been with any other man. Jack declares the same. After the two express their passion for each other, Jack notes, "we got us a f― situation here. Got a figure out what to do." Ennis determines that nothing can be done since they both have families and warns Jack that if they are seen together, they may be killed.

Jack informs Ennis that he thinks someone saw them together on the mountain, but does not tell him that it was Aguirre, who subsequently did not rehire Jack for the ranch. When Jack insists the two could get a ranch together, Ennis declares that he is stuck in his situation and cannot get out. He does not want to end up like a gay man in his hometown who was beaten to death by the locals. His father, who had taken him to see the corpse, would have, Ennis insists, done the same to him if he had walked into their motel room. The only future Ennis can see for the two of them is to get together once in a while, explaining "if you can't fix it you got to stand it." Despondent, Jack convinces Ennis to go with him for a few days into the mountains.

Part 3

Ennis and Alma grow apart as she begins to resent him for not finding a steady, well-paying job and for his occasional fishing trips with Jack. When she eventually divorces him, he returns to ranch work. He stays in touch with Alma, who has remarried, and with his children. One night when he visits them, Alma tells him that she knows that he and Jack never did any fishing on their trips together. When she voices her disgust over his relationship with Jack, Ennis physically threatens her and storms out to a bar where he picks a fight.

During the following years, Ennis and Jack occasionally meet on different ranges throughout the West. One night, they catch each other up on their lives, both admitting affairs with women and problems with their own children. After complaining about the infrequency of their time together, Jack suggests that they move to Mexico, but Ennis declines, insisting that he has to stay and work. When Ennis expresses his pain over their separation, Jack reminds him that Ennis turned down a life together and declares that he can barely stand being apart from Ennis. Overwhelmed with emotion, Ennis drops to his knees. Later, Jack remembers a perfect moment of togetherness on Brokeback Mountain.

Part 4

Months later, when Ennis receives back a postcard he had sent to Jack marked "DECEASED," he calls Lureen, who informs him that Jack was killed when a tire blew up in his face. Ennis suspects, however, that he was murdered after he was caught with another man. He makes a trip to see Jack's parents and offers to take Jack's ashes up to Brokeback Mountain, where Jack had told Lureen that he wanted to be buried.

Jack's father admits that Jack had planned on bringing Ennis up to his family's ranch to work it with him. When Jack's father tells Ennis that not too long ago, Jack found another man that he wanted to bring to the ranch, Ennis realizes that Jack was murdered. As he notes Mr. Twist's coldness, Ennis remembers Jack telling him about a vicious beating he received from his father when he was a small child.

During the visit, Ennis goes up to Jack's room where he finds Jack's shirt, which is covered in Ennis's blood. He remembers Jack accidentally kneeing his nose during lovemaking on the mountain. Inside the shirt, he finds one of his own. Ennis then buries his face in Jack's shirt, hoping to be able to smell his scent, but there is nothing there. Before Ennis leaves, Mr. Twist informs him that Jack's ashes will be buried in the family plot, what Ennis calls that "grieving plain," instead of on the mountain.

The narrative then jumps back to the beginning of the story as Ennis orders a postcard of Brokeback Mountain in the local store. When it arrives, he pins it up in his trailer above the two shirts from Jack's room hung on a hanger. During that time, a young Jack appears in his dreams along with visions of their time at Brokeback Mountain, which would fill him sometimes with grief, sometimes with joy. The story ends with what has become Ennis's motto: "if you can't fix it you've got to stand it."

Media Adaptations

"Brokeback Mountain" was made into an award-winning film, starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal. Directed by Ang Lee, the film was released in 2005