I read this short story after seeing the movie and both are heartbreakingly beautiful in their own way. The book is straight to the point and grabs you with the dialog and prose. It was written in a way stories are sometimes told orally yet this creates a fast read. The movie has amazing open lonely cold landscape of Brokeback Mountain that parallels with the boys own loneliness and emptiness. Both capture the raw emotion that these boys fight with when trying to hold onto what they have in each other but struggling with the threat of violent unacceptance and time that is tied up in working to get by.

Proulx is able to capture the stoic life of Wyoming cowboy men brilliantly and the emotional detachment they try to have but ultimately succumb to. "If can't fix it you got to stand it" is easier said than done. It's Heartbreaking. Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist learn how difficult this can be. Brokeback Mountain is a tragic love story between these two Wyoming cowboys who make by the best they can. Without much formal education, they take on the rough living of ranch hands. Its a raw look of the lonely lives of cowboys with a twist. They find comfort and company in each other on Brokeback Mountain but ignore all talk about intimacy between them proclaiming "I'm no Queer." Ennis was particularly careful after seeing first hand what happens to those men who choose to take up ranch together. After leaving Brokeback, they get on with their miserable lonely lives. They each marry a woman and have children but after years pass by they reconnect and realize that what they have wasn't a one time affair. They were drawn together passionately and can't fight it.