The Characters
Jack Torrance, a brilliant but uncelebrated writer, must deal with the underlying emotional problems caused by his violent childhood. He uses drinking to escape from his problems but in doing so creates still more problems for himself. Alcohol makes him lose his job, reinforces his feelings of inadequacy, and causes his already hot temper to grow even worse: On one occasion he breaks the arm of his son Danny while punishing him for spilling beer on his papers. Torrance is a pitiful figure, the weakest in the family, and he is the most clearly drawn. He is a study in the collapse of a human being.
Wendy Torrance is drawn, like many of King’s women, as a traditional wife and mother. Wendy has some psychological problems of her own: She is always unconsciously competing with her mother, who resented Wendy for the death of a younger sister, and who has derided her choice of Jack as a husband, and criticized the way she is rearing Danny. Wendy tries to be patient and understanding, but she has little pity or forgiveness for Jack, forever reminding him of his failures. She does not trust her husband to be alone with Danny and competes with him for Danny’s affection. In this family tug-of-war, it seems that Wendy has won, but Danny has not stopped loving his father even though Wendy almost has.
Danny Torrance is a very likable little boy, barely five years old, yet startlingly mature for his age. He has strong psychic powers, a “shining,” that he cannot yet control. At first the power is either a mere bother or a pleasant diversion, but soon Danny’s abilities grow too powerful for him to handle. The hotel, with its evil atmosphere, wants to corrupt Danny and use his power. It seeks to add him to the ghosts which haunt its halls.
Characters Discussed
Jack Torrance
Jack Torrance, a former preparatory school teacher in his early thirties who has taken the job of winter caretaker for the isolated Overlook Hotel, high in the Colorado Rockies. He hopes to use this time to restore intimacy to his relationships with his wife, Wendy, and his young son, Danny, and also to renew his earlier successes as a writer. These intentions are complicated and threatened by the darker elements in Jack’s character: a history of alcoholism, a background of child abuse (learned from his father and already manifested in one episode against Danny), an uncontrolled temper, and self-destructive thoughts and tendencies that, in the past, have led to a serious contemplation of suicide. These flaws make Jack especially vulnerable to the malevolent powers of the Overlook, and he is led eventually to betray loyalties to wife and son. In the final moment of his life, the strength of his love for Danny overpowers even the evil persona with which the hotel has endowed him. A final glimpse at Jack’s almost lost humanity materializes and then is destroyed in a climactic explosion and conflagration.
Wendy Torrance
Wendy Torrance, Jack’s pretty wife, also in her early thirties. Despite past problems, she is committed to her husband, but only when this commitment does not conflict with her loyalty to her young son. She joins Jack at the Overlook with the highest hopes, but when the vicious ghosts of the hotel begin to absorb Jack’s personality, she finds unforeseen strength to protect Danny and to survive their encounter with the Overlook.
Danny “Doc” Torrance
Danny “Doc” Torrance, Jack and Wendy’s five-year-old son, gifted with “the shining,” a telepathic ability to read the thoughts of other people and to visualize...
(This entire section contains 561 words.)
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future events. It is Danny’s presence and his special abilities that seem to activate the stored-up evils of the Overlook. Danny inspires great love in his father, a love that is Jack’s strongest claim to respectability and, ultimately, to his own humanity.
Dick Hallorann
Dick Hallorann, a single black man in his sixties, the summer-season cook at the Overlook Hotel. When he meets the Torrances in the autumn, on closing day, he feels an instant affinity with Danny; Hallorann, too, has a touch of “the shining.” An urgent telepathic message from Danny eventually summons the kindly Hallorann to return from Florida to the Overlook in the depth of winter to rescue Wendy and Danny.
Albert Shockley
Albert Shockley, a shadowy character, a single man of independent, and perhaps illegally obtained, wealth. During Jack’s days at Stovington Prep, Shockley, a board member, was Jack’s drinking buddy and fellow alcoholic. More recently, as a part owner of the Overlook, he is responsible for Jack finding employment as caretaker. By telephone, he later discourages Jack’s interest in researching and writing the history of the Overlook and its unsavory background.
Stuart Ullman
Stuart Ullman, the short, plump, officious manager of the Overlook. He gives Jack Torrance the caretaker’s job, against his better judgment, because of Shockley’s influence.
Delbert Grady
Delbert Grady, the ghost of an earlier Overlook caretaker who murdered his wife and two young daughters many winters before, apparently in a fit of cabin fever. He is one of Jack’s hallucinations during the period when the hotel seduces and overpowers Jack’s personality.
Characters
The Shining features a relatively small cast of characters given its length and scope. At the center of the story, where all thematic and structural elements converge, stands Jack Torrance. He is a man tormented by guilt and failure in his roles as a husband, father, teacher, and aspiring author. Haunted by memories of his own alcoholic and violent father, Jack sees the opportunity to serve as the winter caretaker of a luxurious hotel in the Rocky Mountains as his last chance to set his life straight. However, instead of becoming the man he hopes to be, Jack's time at the Overlook Hotel turns into a horrifying descent into subhuman depravity. Much of the novel's allure lies in the author's skillful portrayal of Jack's gradual psychological collapse.
Danny Torrance, Jack's five-year-old son, is an intriguing yet somewhat incomplete character. Children and adolescents often play significant and central roles in many of King's works, but in The Shining, Danny primarily serves as a somewhat mystical potential victim. Possessing "The Shining," a precognitive and telepathic ability, Danny becomes the ultimate target of the hotel's collective evil. Although he can foresee certain critical events, he struggles to interpret them correctly. Except for his final confrontation with the hotel in the form of his transformed father, Danny's ability to influence events is limited.
As the novel progresses, its most nebulous and unsettling character, the Overlook Hotel, grows ever more intense. The force that inhabits and animates the hotel gradually manifests through various words and actions, becoming a vast and menacing antagonistic presence. This transformation renders the Overlook Hotel perhaps the most memorable and vividly personified haunted house in literature.
