The Roque Mallet Symbol Analysis

The Overlook Hotel has the best roque court in America, and the roque mallet is a symbol of Jack Torrance’s murderous rage and insanity in Stephen King’s The Shining. Roque is an English game similar to croquet, and the roque mallet, has one soft end and one hard end. The mallet first appears in one of the visions that Tony shows Danny. Danny’s vision occurs before his family moves to the Overlook Hotel, and in it, a dark figure with a mallet chases Danny through a strange hallway. “Come on and take your medicine!” the figure yells, swinging the mallet at Danny again and again. Later, when Jack comes home, Danny sees a bloody mallet on the front seat of the family’s car. He blinks, and the mallet becomes a bag of groceries. Danny’s vision is a premonition of the Overlook Hotel, and the dark figure chasing him with the mallet is Jack.

At the Overlook Hotel, when Danny falls into one of his many trances, he begins to chant: “Roque. Stroke. Redrum.” “Redrum” is a word Danny sees scribbled on mirrors in his visions, but he doesn’t know what it means. “Redrum,” of course, is “murder” backwards, and Danny sees this word in his recurring visions of the mallet-wielding figure in the hallway of the Overlook Hotel. When Jack finally goes insane and decides to kill Wendy and Danny, he first attacks Wendy with the roque mallet. Jack savagely beats her with the mallet, breaking her ribs and her back, and when he stops, the “business end” (presumably the hard end), is clotted with her blood and hair. Jack takes the mallet and looks for Danny next, roaming through the halls and yelling just like in Danny’s vision; however, when Jack finds Danny on the third floor, Jack drops the mallet to the floor and tells Danny to run. Jack’s love for his son is so strong that he is able to fight the evil of the Overlook Hotel and his own rage, and when he drops the mallet, Jack both literally and metaphorically resists his murderous insanity and spares Danny’s life.