Desire or Love

“He pressed his face into the fabric and breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty sweet stink of Jack but there was no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands.” Memory plays an important part in the complex relationship between Ennis and Jack and raises interesting questions about the line between desire and love. When the author writes “there was no real scent, only the memory of it” the author is implying the lack of substance the relationship held giving it the ability to fade away into a mere distant memory. The author leads readers to believe that the love experienced between the two was merely the product of desire and not really love at all. Each encounter, as infrequent and brief as they were, was driven by sexual desire and the memory of each visit kept alive by the remembrance of their shared sexual pleasure. There was never enough time spent together to allow the relationship to grow beyond the first few stages of love; desire and attraction. Thus, the only thing the two had to build the relationship was based on the memory of the sex they shared. Can the relationship shared between Ennis and Jack even be classified as love at its youngest stage or is it the product of sexual obsession?