The Scrapbook Symbol Analysis

While checking the boiler in the basement of the Overlook Hotel, Jack finds an old scrapbook, which serves within The Shining as a symbol of the hotel’s rich and sordid history; however, the scrapbook also symbolizes the strange power the hotel has over Jack to influence his actions and drive him insane. Jack finds the scrapbook in a box full of old ledgers, newspapers, and receipts for toilet paper. It is made of thick white leather, and the pages are bound in gold string. When Jack opens the scrapbook, an invitation to the masked ball celebrating the grand opening of the hotel in 1945 falls out. Each page of the scrapbook is full of old newspaper clippings about the hotel and its former owner, Horace Derwent. There are clippings about the various deaths at the hotel and the “gangland-style shooting” outside the Presidential Suite in 1966. All of the Overlook’s history—both good and bad—is inside the scrapbook.

Jack doesn’t know who the scrapbook belongs to, and he scours the basement and attic trying to find clues about the owner. Jack spends hours alone, searching for evidence, and he begins to slip further and further into insanity. He gets the idea to write a book about the Overlook after finding the scrapbook, but when he tells Ullman about his idea, Ullman threatens to fire him. Ullman, it seems, doesn’t want the hotel’s past disclosed in a book. When Jack is finally driven completely insane by the evil forces of the hotel, he hallucinates a conversation with Grady—the former caretaker who went insane and killed his family and himself—in which Grady tells him that “the manager” left the scrapbook in the basement for Jack to find. By “the manager,” Grady doesn’t mean Mr. Ullman. Grady means to say that the evil forces of the hotel—the same forces that are slowly driving Jack insane and convincing him to murder his family and himself so they can become ghosts in the hotel—left the scrapbook for Jack to find in order to pique his interest and lure him away from his family with obsessive thoughts of book writing. In this sense, the scrapbook represents the Overlook itself, and the magnetic, maddening effect it has on Jack.  Alone and isolated, Jack is more vulnerable to the hotel’s forces and his worsening insanity, and the scrapbook draws him to this self-imposed isolation.