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In The Shining, by Stephen King, the most obvious and important theme of the story is isolation. This story is based on isolation and how taxing it can be on someone and their mental health. In The Shining, the isolation shapes the mental states of the protagonists and how they react. In this story, the simple task of staying at a hotel and maintaining it over the winter turns into a horrifying environment with very shocking conclusions.
Jack Torrance gets a job to maintain the Overlook Hotel during the winter.
Jack brings his wife and son with him to stay. The family is mostly happy but can be a little dysfunctional at times. The isolation the hotel brings upon Jack combined with his bad history of alcoholism, trouble with writing, and short temper, is what really drives him insane. Jack is very stressed, for many reasons. Jack tries to maintain the hotel while he is also trying to work on his writing.
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Mr. Torrance doesn’t have a great temper either, he used to help calm himself with alcohol, but has tried to stay clean of it. His family starts to distract him, and eventually he loses it. Jack had sat all day at his desk trying to think of something to write all by himself, isolated. Jack had so many things he was stressed about, and he didn’t really have any way of de-stressing.
Wendy and Jack Torrance’s son, Danny, gets very isolated from his family during his stay at the hotel.
Danny has a unique talent of seeing things people usually cannot see or understand. The chef of the hotel also has this talent and can communicate with Danny easily, but the chef does not stay at the hotel. Danny’s parents do not understand him and worry about his health. Danny tries to cope with his “talent” by having an imaginary friend named Tony that sometimes speaks for him. Since so many people see Danny differently and it is hard for him to get a long, he is very isolated.
The Overlook Hotel in ways itself is haunting. The hotel often has guests that it manipulates. Throughout time, the hotel has chosen many victims to drive insane. The hotel uses isolation to its advantage to do whatever it pleases to do to its residents. The hotel often shows visions to people at the hotel to make them think they are going crazy, and eventually it can drive them to insanity. Danny would often see visions of the twin girls that were murdered there, and Jack would see visions of the people who used to stay at the hotel and even have conversations with them.
Isolation is a major theme in The Shining and it is what puts the whole story together. Isolation can make anyone go mad and look insane, all it requires is time. Jack and his family being dysfunctional combined with being isolated in a haunting hotel with no exposure to the real world is what ultimately drives Jack crazy, showing how much of an impact isolationism has on a person.
The Analysis Of The Story "The Shining" By Stephen King. (2024, Feb 02). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/the-analysis-of-the-story-the-shining-by-stephen-king-essay
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