The Shining Sparknotes

678 Words2 Pages

Stephen Kings, The Shining, is a mind blowing and intense story about how evil can affect and control people. Jack Torrance, a recovering alcoholic, takes his wife and son, Danny, up to the mountains in Colorado to a hotel that Jack was recently hired to look over during the winter months. For that period of time, the family will be isolated from the rest of the world. The history and stories of The Overlook hotel, that Jack learns and hears about, indicates that the hotel possesses some kind of evil. In The Shining, King uses flashback, symbolism and foreshadowing to show that the weak can easily become consumed by evil.

King shows that with Jack's past, he can easily lose control over situations. Jack did a lot of things in the past that he regrets. When working at the hotel, he gets flashbacks. He thinks back to when he broke Danny's arm and when he almost killed him …show more content…

The smallest situations and stories build up to prove to the Torrance family that there really is evil within the halls of The Overlook. The wasps coming back after being exterminated was just the beginning. The dead woman who was found in the bathtub of room 217 was a sign, and an even bigger one when she came alive and tried to strangle Danny. Danny had visions of brains and blood on the walls in one of the rooms and this makes him wary. "So if you should see something, in a hallway or a room or outside by those hedges... just look the other way and when you look back, it'll be gone," says Hallorann (88). At first what Dick Hallorann, the hotel's chef, said was true and it worked. However, later when Danny looked back, the frightening objects remained visable. It seems as if these haunting sights are trying to tell the family that they really shouldn't be at the hotel. It also seems that the hotel's morbid history is a warning to

More about The Shining Sparknotes

Open Document