The Shining. Who doesn’t see that iconic horror movie in her mind whenever the book is mentioned. I’ll admit to being as much or more of a fan of Jack Nicholson as I am of anyone. (I’m not much of a fan by nature or by principle.) But there’s something that he brings to each role he’s in – a wild, unpredictable charisma – that I enjoy.
He was brilliant as the Joker in Batman. He was hilariously inappropriate in As Good as it Gets. He was unapologetically genuine in Something’s Gotta Give. And he was ruthless in The Shining.
Of course, this isn’t a blog post about Jack Nicholson, fun as that might be. However, whereas I’d usually shun the movie in favor of the book, in his case, he embodies the literary character of Jack Torrance so well that if it helps to get hold of the character, by all means, at least see the movie.
[Note: King notoriously hated everything about Kubrick’s movie, but if you’ve read the book, it’s clear that Jack Torrance and Jack Nicholson are basically the same person. You can read about King’s response here, but the warmth that King claims is missing from the movie is also missing from the pages of the book. Despite King’s intentions, Jack Torrance is a cold, harsh man with no redeeming qualities. We’ll get into that more below!]
Overview
On the surface, this is a story about desperation and last chances. Jack Torrance has been fired from his private school teaching job due to an altercation with a student. He’s an English teacher and a writer on the side, with little money in the bank. So when a new job comes up as the winter caretaker of an upscale inn located in the remote mountains of Colorado, he uproots his wife and son and settles in for a long winter at the Overlook Hotel.
But it isn’t long before Jack, Wendy and little Danny discover that they aren’t the only guests locked in for the season. The only problem is that the other guests – all of them long dead – want Jack and Danny to join them.
Theme
The story is complicated, as you might have guessed, by an ability (or liability) that Jack and Danny possess – something King calls, the shining. It’s a form of communication and perception between certain people, living or dead, who also have this gift. It’s also a sort of imperfect precognition.
Call it telepathy on steroids. (As a side note: if you’ve read The Institute, one of King’s most recent works, released in 2020, you’ll notice that he revisits this type of ability in a fresh way in that book…clearly King has a thing for this kind of mental tendency.)
What’s clever is that King uses two characters with the same gift and shows their very different responses to it. Both Jack and Danny are frightened by the gift itself and what they are able to perceive. However, Jack is hardened throughout the book by his perception of the dead around him due to his desperation. The dead use the gift to prey upon his self-centeredness, his ego and his latent anger to goad him into serving their purposes.
Just the opposite is true of Danny. He’s a sweet boy, gentle and sensitive. As the gift grows in him, he becomes increasingly empathetic towards his parents whose thoughts he perceives and Dick Hallorann, the mentor figure with whom he shares an especially close connection.
Kubrick stated that the theme of the movie is “there’s something inherently wrong with the human personality. There’s an evil side to it.”
Of course that’s in there. But the theme of the book is much deeper and it’s Danny who embodies it so well. In him readers see that the ability to connect with others more deeply, to know them in truth [something the shining portrays] should make us more responsible and compassionate. It should strengthen our ties to one another.
Poor Danny, who’s only five years old at the time of the story, takes on a maturity and a burden for his family that no child should have to bear. But it’s notable for that very reason. What shouldn’t exist in a child becomes a striking example of how this kind of knowledge should affect a person.
Jack Torrance
But then there’s Jack. I found King’s objections to the movie somewhat baffling. He speaks about Jack Torrance is if he sees a level of compassion in him that readers don’t. And I’m sure he does.
However, what makes it to the page is that Jack is volatile and violent. From the beginning of the story, readers learn two things about him: he assaulted his son so violently that he broke his arm, and he severely injures one of his former pupils. Jack had cut the student, George Hatfield, from the debate team due to his stutter, and George had accused Jack of setting the timer ahead so that he didn’t have the time to finish his debate. In response, George cut Jack’s tires and Jack then beat him so severely that he nearly died.
Later we learn that Jack did set the timer ahead. So he’s a nasty liar who treats people unfairly.
All of this makes Jack a very interesting main character. He comes to the story deeply flawed, so flawed that the shining becomes more of a liability for him. It exposes him, preys on his weaknesses, leaves him feeling vulnerable and disconnected from humanity – even his own family.
I wouldn’t change a thing about this character. Jack is a great example of what the shining – a gift that exaggerates the truth – does to someone who has such an evil character. But the fact that King thinks of him as warm surprises me to the point of humor.
Is it Gothic?
In this story we have a number of Gothic tropes: isolation, a haunted hotel, madness, and stormy weather. But is this a Gothic story?
The theme deals with the effect of a psychological ability (the shining) – a deeper knowledge or awareness of others – on the emotional and relational state of the person possessing the gift. That’s a particularly irrational theme – one we can’t prove empirically.
Further, each of the Gothic tropes works to support the theme. The isolation emphasizes the deep internal, psychological nature of this exploration. The haunted hotel is something of a manifestation of the shining itself, testing the gifted one to see his response and resilience to different types of knowledge. The madness that consumes Jack is a deeper form of this testing and his failure to resist its siren call. And the stormy weather is a reflection of the internal battle each of these characters faces at the Overlook.
Thus, I would definitely call this a Gothic novel.
Conclusion
The Shining is an interesting book but it has a strange feel about it, especially for those who read much of King’s more recent work. I like a lot of his writing, but I don’t love this book. It’s a good example of modern Gothic work, but it has an ugliness about it: the hotel itself, the family dynamics, the character of Jack are all presented as dismal and hopeless. This casts a dark cloud over the novel.
Some Gothic readers will like this one. However, I prefer my Gothic books to be a mixture of beauty and darkness. This one is just dark.
That said, it’s still worth reading and it isn’t a terribly long book. If you haven’t read it already, add it to your winter reading list.
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