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I have started reading The
Shining, a novel written by best selling author, Stephen King. The novel begins
with the main character, Jack Torrance, at an interview for a job as the
off-season caretaker of the Overlook Hotel. Mr. Ullman, the hotel manager,
gives the job to Jack and explains his duties and responsibilities. He would
have to go down to the cellar and pump the boiler, which would heat the hotel.
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| This is how Tony is described by Danny. |
Later that day Jack returned home to his son Danny and his wife Wendy and
informs them that he got the job and that they would have to move to Colorado
for the winter. From various flashbacks the author gives us background information
about this family. Jack was an alcoholic for almost three years, every night he
came home without even being to walk. Once his son Danny had spilled some of
Jack’s beer on his paperwork. Jack had squeezed his arm with all his might and
twisted it. Danny had to be rushed to the hospital with a broken arm. Since
then Wendy had considered divorcing Jack, for everyone’s benefit.
But to prove
he could change, Jack had stopped drinking all together. Danny had a gift. He
could see what other people where thinking and feeling. He would these dreams,
or hallucination, where his imaginary friend, Tony, would show up and show him
things that where about to happen. Tony would show him the future. Just before
they move into the Overlook Hotel for the winter, Danny has this hallucination
about the hotel, there is something wrong about it. Something sinister lurks in
the Hotel. A specific word kept haunting Danny in his dreams. REDRUM
“Danny had poured the
can of beer all over the pages. Probably to see it foam. See it foam, see it
foam, the words played over and over in his mind like a single sick chord on an
out-of-tune piano, completing the circuit of his rage. He stepped deliberately
toward his three-year-old son, who was looking up at him with that pleased
grin, his pleasure at the job of work so successfully and recently completed in
Daddy's study; Danny began to say something and that was when he had grabbed
Danny's hand and bent it to make him drop the typewriter eraser and the
mechanical pencil he was clenching in it. Danny had cried out a little ... no
... no ... tell the truth ... he screamed. It was all hard to remember through
the fog of anger, the sick single thump of that one Spike Jones chord.” (23)
What????
Just try to imagine your own father breaking your arm when you where three,
just because you spilled his beer. Just think of all the beatings Danny had to
take from his drunk father when he was just three. I feel extremely sorry for
Danny, not just for this incident, but for every night his father came home
drunk. He would tell Danny horrible bedtime stories that would haunt Danny’s
dreams and thoughts.
“Any big hotels have got
scandals,” he said. “Just like every big hotel has got a ghost. Why? Hell,
people come and go. Sometimes one of em will pop off in his room, heart attack
or stroke or something like that. Hotel are superstitious places.” (31)
I find
it kind of weird that Mr. Ullman would say something like this. Is there
something wrong with the hotel? Is there some kind of ghost or something that
Jack and his family should watch out for? Is there some previous history of
deaths or suicides in the Overlook Hotel?
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