Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx
Published 2005 · 55 pages · 15,125 words · about 1 hour at an average pace · Literary Fiction, LGBTQ+ Fiction, Short Fiction
How hard is Brokeback Mountain to read?
Brokeback Mountain scores 45 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 38 out of 100
- Proulx uses plain, regional ranch speech mixed with precise terms for landscape, livestock and weather, but the language is never obscure. It is more textured than The Great Gatsby's polish yet far plainer than Lolita.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Sentences are clipped and fragmentary, often stacked in lists, with occasional long accumulating lines of landscape. It is leaner and more broken than the balanced rhythms of Gatsby.
- Abstraction: 38 out of 100
- The story stays concrete: sheep, tents, trucks, postcards and shirts. Its emotional content is implied, but nothing becomes philosophical, much like the grounded events of To Kill a Mockingbird.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- At novella length, Proulx compresses twenty years into a few scenes and omits most of the connecting life. Each paragraph carries a lot, but the surface is clear, similar in compression to Gatsby.
- Narrative indirection: 60 out of 100
- Ennis and Jack rarely name what they feel, so readers infer love from gestures, silences and the shirts in the closet. The reader must read between the lines more than in Gatsby, though the story is still plainly told.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- The shirts, the mountain and the postcard carry heavy meaning, though they stay grounded in the literal. The symbolism is more focused than Gatsby's green light and valley of ashes.
- Ironic distance: 35 out of 100
- Proulx narrates with dry, detached restraint, and the gap between what Ennis says and what he feels is the story's engine. The tone stays earnest rather than satirical, closer to The Remains of the Day than to Lolita.
- Resolution withholding: 42 out of 100
- Events conclude with Jack's death and Ennis's final scene, which closes the plot, but how Jack died stays uncertain and the ending offers no comfort. It closes the story more firmly than Gatsby's open meaning.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- The story moves in elliptical jumps across two decades and shifts between past and present in Ennis's memory. It is more fragmented than 1984's clear parts, but short and manageable.
How Brokeback Mountain is regarded
Brokeback Mountain holds a literary regard score of 70 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.