The Shining

“It was possible to graduate from passive to active, to take the thing that had once driven you nearly to madness as a neutral prize of no more than occasional academic interest”

Jack tells himself that his time at the Overlook is helping him recover. He has been convalescing in one way or another for years at this point, but he is now ready to take a more active role in his own recovery. Jack’s past obsessions with writing and with academic prestige are not as important to him; rather, he simply wants to be a better—and more active—person, father, and husband.

“You could be stung, but you could also sting back. He believed that sincerely”

Here, Jack prepares the bug bomb in an effort to destroy the wasps’ nest. His sense of injustice is keen, and he feels a need to hit back at anything that hurts him. The targets of his grievance include the board that expelled him from his job at Stovington, Ullmann’s condescension, Wendy’s supposedly unfair judgments of his character, and anyone who celebrated his downfall.

“This inhuman place makes human monsters”

Tony repeats this phrase to Danny throughout much of the book. The first time Danny hears it is when Jack is checking the boiler and trying to forget about drinking. The monsters in the Overlook are supernatural, but first they were humans who were corrupted by the hotel’s evil. Jack’s evolution from tormented family man to the monster who chases them with the mallet is the clearest evidence of the quote’s truth.

“Once, during the drinking phase, Wendy had accused him of desiring his own destruction but not possessing the necessary moral fiber to support a full-blown deathwish. So he manufactured ways in which other people could do it, lopping a piece at a time off himself and their family”

Jack is addicted to alcohol, but he hates himself for it. He also loathes his alcohol- and temper-induced actions, such as when he breaks Danny’s arm, or the confrontation with George Hatfield. Jacks puts himself in positions where people can give him the punishments he cannot give himself.

“How many times, over how many years, had he—a grown man—asked for the mercy of another chance? He was suddenly so sick of himself, so revolted, that he could have groaned aloud”

Jack’s self-loathing is part of what makes him such a human character deserving of empathy, despite his slide into murderous toxicity. He does not always justify his actions defensively. Rather, he finds himself tedious, predictable, and pitiful. However, these feelings are often what give rise to his temper and his defensiveness.

“But grownups were always in a turmoil, every possible action muddied over by thoughts of the consequences, by self-doubt, by self-image, by feelings of love and responsibility. Every possible choice seemed to have drawbacks, and sometimes he didn't understand why the drawbacks were drawbacks. It was very hard”

Danny finds the prospect of adulthood paralyzing. Because he knows his parents’ thoughts and fears, he understands the burdens they bear. Children are not required to make decisions with the long view in mind; they are rarely in a turmoil of their own creation, because that is more typical of adults.

“He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to”

Stephen King often features writers as his main characters. This allows him to talk about the craft of writing through Jack. Jack feels the urge to write, and the urge can only be satisfied by writing. He believes that he will finish his book and his play, because he cannot imagine ignoring the urge to write them.

“You have to kill him, Jacky, and her, too. Because a real artist must suffer. Because each man kills the thing he loves. Because they’ll always be conspiring against you, trying to hold you back and drag you down”

In the boiler room, Jack hears his father’s voice coming through the CB radio. Eventually, Jack will see his father’s point of view; Wendy and Danny are only trying to keep him from succeeding. They want to emasculate him and keep him from reaching his potential. Jack’s father badly beat his mother with a cane. Decades later, Jack will be so possessed by the Overlook that he thinks his father’s crime was reasonable and necessary.

“And that's when you realize what the Wagon really is, Lloyd. It's a church with bars on the windows, a church for women and a prison for you”

Jack laments his struggles with sobriety to Lloyd the bartender. When he arrives at the reality of sobriety, it is unsatisfying and fails to make his life easier. Rather, the” Wagon” is a torment for Jack. It is incarceration within one’s own addicted body, and without alcohol, Jack has few other sources of relief.

“When we grow up, concepts gradually get easier and we leave the images to the poets”

Jack talks to Wendy about his views on precognition. It is easier for a child to access and interpret an image than a concept. As children become adults, they are more likely to think in terms of concepts than in images. Working with imagery as an adult is, in Jack’s view, an artistic endeavor, like poetry. Most of Danny’s most traumatic experiences in the Overlook are about what he sees, not what he thinks.

“You can move away from a stranger. You can’t move away from yourself”

Wendy is unnerved when Jack suggests that Danny might have caused the bruises on his own throat. The idea frightens her more than having a hostile stranger wandering the hotel. Danny might be able to escape from the woman in 217, but they will never be able to get away from themselves. Many of Jack’s difficulties arise from this very fact; no matter where he goes, he is still himself in terms of emotions, insecurities, and appetites.

“It was not just Danny the Overlook was working on. It was working on him, too. It wasn't Danny who was the weak link, it was him. He was the vulnerable one, the one who could be bent and twisted until something snapped”

Jack has many moments of insight before the hotel takes him entirely. He knows that the Overlook can exploit his fractured, weakened psyche to control him. The hotel exerts a constant pressure on Jack that he knows could eventually cause him to lash out at whomever is nearby.

“But Danny could not seem to see exactly what the something was. His father was guarding that carefully, even in his own mind. Was it possible, Danny wondered, to be glad you had done something and still be so ashamed of that something that you tried not to think of it? The question was a disturbing one. He didn't think such a thing was possible... in a normal mind”

Danny is not aware that he’s sensing Jack’s satisfaction at having thrown away the snowmobile’s battery. The idea that his father could be glad about something, while still feeling the need to hide it, disturbs Danny. A mind that could compartmentalize such disparate realities would have to be under enormous stress.

“Morning gave way to afternoon, and in the afternoons he felt a little better. And afternoon gave way to night. As some great twentieth-century thinker had said, night must fall”

Jack’s days move in cycles of depression and the need for alcohol. He is never able to have peace for long. Any positive moment he experiences is taken away by the hotel, which reminds him that the dark comes at the end of each day. Afternoons are when Jack tends to feel the least vulnerable, and when the hotel seems most willing to leave him alone.

“But it wasn’t really empty. Because here in the Overlook things just went on and on”

Danny understands that something about time in the Overlook is non-linear. The party is always happening, and it is always midnight if the hotel wants it to be. There is no such thing as the empty Overlook. Its inhabitants are always trying to find ways to appear and menace the tenants.

“Dying was a part of living. You had to keep tuning in to that if you expected to be a whole person. And if the fact of your own death was hard to understand, at least it wasn’t impossible to accept”

Dick enjoys his time in Florida, but his experiences at the Overlook remind him that death is always inevitable. He can accept his death, and he proves it when he goes to Colorado to try to help Danny and Wendy. He does not expect to return once he leaves Sidewinder, but he keeps going because he wants to be a good, whole person.

“The wheels of progress; sooner or later they took you back to where you started from”

Wendy sees Danny’s swollen lip and assumes that Jack hurt him again. She realizes that she rarely gives Jack the benefit of the doubt. She assumes that he will let her down, and that they will replay the cycle endlessly. Progress is an illusion if there is never any actual improvement.

“Fire will kill anything”

Jack remembers his father dealing with a wasps’ nest. As he prepared to burn it, he reminded Jack that everything is vulnerable to fire. This memory foreshadows the explosion that will destroy the Overlook Hotel. Only fire is enough to cleanse its evil and remove it from the world.

“It is the line soldier who ultimately pays for any foreign intervention”

The woman on the plane reacts to the (fake) plate in Dick’s head, the result of a war wound. She believes that the CIA is responsible for many hidden wars. What she does not know is that Dick is heading into another sort of battle. He might not have a plate in his head, but he will soon be a casualty in a fight.

“You’re the caretaker sir…you’ve always been the caretaker. I should know, sir, I’ve always been here.       The same manager hired us both, at the same time”

Grady corrects Jack when Jack tells him he was the caretaker. The manager is never revealed, but according to Grady, Jack has always been at the Overlook since his hiring. However, Grady was the caretaker who killed his family. The ghosts in the hotel are trapped there and are doomed to play a role in all future hauntings.

“Living by your wits is always knowing where the wasps are”

Jack compares everything that has ever tried to bring him down to the wasps. He sees the whole world as a dormant wasps’ nest and believes his vigilance is what keeps them at bay. However, he was unable to protect Danny from the wasps, even though he knew where they were. He assumed he had killed them all, when in fact he only angered the survivors.

“I didn’t bring you here, Danny. You brought yourself. Because you knew”

Tony explains that Danny is in the deepest part of his mind for a reason and of his own volition. Danny knew that nothing could hurt him while he was in the quiet place where Tony hides. He is there because he hopes that he can hide from his father, but going into his mind will not protect Danny’s physical body.

“But see that you get on. That's your job in this hard world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter what. Pull your act together and just go on”

Before the Overlook possessed Jack completely, his last words to Danny were to remember how much he loved him. Dick reminds him that life will not stop just because of their ordeal. Danny’s job is to remember that there are things worth loving and that he must keep going.