Brokeback Mountain - Annie Proulx

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Choose a novel or short story which deals with true love, unrequited love or love

betrayed.

Discuss the writer’s exploration of the theme and show to what extent it conveys a

powerful message about the nature of love.

806 words

Annie Proulx's “Brokeback Mountain” is a short story that deals with the theme of unrequited love.

The story tells of a love affair spanning two decades between two men whose relationship begins as young, aimless, hired sheep herders on the symbolic “Brokeback” in rural Wyoming. The homosexual relationship is juxtaposed against an unforgiving life and landscape that perpetuates 'traditional' American mid-western values and as such, we understand our protagonists' relationship is doomed from the beginning.

Proulx use of non-linear narrative establishes this mood of loss and unrequited love in the story's opening when we are told of Ennis Del Mar waking to his humdrum existence in a trailer (belonging to his daughter) yet “suffused with a sense of pleasure because Jack Twist was in his dream”.  As he looks to the comfort in his reminiscence of their days “on the mountain when they owned the world”  the introduction ends with;

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The wind strikes the trailer like a load of dirt coming off a dump truck”

This rude awakening foreshadows the story of their relationship which Proulx now turns to – it was very much a dream which could never last and which the environment it existed within would never permit.

As the story of the “pair of deuces goin' nowhere” begins, Proulx continues this use of setting as a foreshadowing device upon the mountain itself. On the trail up to the grazing flat Proulx writes of the men and the animals “flowing” into “the great flowery meadow ...

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