Alcoholism and abuse go hand in hand in The Shining, and together they dominate much of the novel. When Jack Torrance is gets a job as the winter caretaker at the Overlook Hotel, he learns about Grady, the previous caretaker, who went insane and murdered his family before committing suicide. Grady had been an alcoholic, the hotel’s manager, Mr. Ullman, tells Jack, and the tragedy “came as a result of too much cheap whiskey, of which Grady had laid in a generous supply.” Jack has his own history with alcoholism and abuse, but at the time he takes the job at the Overlook Hotel, he has been sober for over a year. Jack’s father was also an abusive alcoholic who savagely beat Jack’s mother with his cane, and Jack is terrified that he is turning into his father. Jack sees the Overlook as an added layer of protection for his sobriety—the hotel’s supply of alcohol was cleared out after the season ended, and once the snow blocks the roads, Jack won’t be able to get any. However, the sinister hotel soon begins to manipulate Jack’s addiction, and he quickly slips back into his abusive ways. Through The Shining, King explores the relationship between alcoholism and abuse and ultimately asserts that one often leads to the other.
Jack’s history with alcoholism and abuse is well established within the novel, and his abusive behavior is fueled by his alcoholism. In Stovington, Vermont, where the Torrances lived before Colorado, Jack was a teacher at a private school when alcohol destroyed his life. There were plenty of heavy drinkers in Stovington, but Jack and his friend Al Shockley were alcoholics, and they “sought each other out like two castoffs who were still social enough to prefer drowning together to doing it alone.” Jack isn’t just a heavy drinker; he is an alcoholic in the extreme, and he spent all his free time in Stovington drinking with Al. Back in Stovington, after a three-year-old Danny spilled beer on a copy of Jack’s play, Jack grabbed Danny in a drunken rage and snapped his arm. Jack was instantly remorseful, but the damage was done. Danny now refers to his father’s drinking as “the Bad Thing,” and it is intricately linked with abuse in his young mind. Jack quit drinking after Danny’s arm, but he soon lost his job when his abusive rage caused him to strike a student named George Hatfield. After the Board of Directors demanded Jack’s resignation, he wanted a drink so badly that he wanted “to take it out on Wendy and Danny. His temper was like a vicious animal on a frayed leash.” Jack’s alcoholism is so severe that it leads to abusive thoughts even when he isn’t drinking.
As the sinister Overlook Hotel begins to destroy Jack and his family, it does so through Jack’s alcoholism. The symptoms of Jack’s addiction begin to manifest—even in the absence of alcohol—and Jack soon reverts to his abusive behavior, again highlighting the connection between alcoholism and abuse. At the hotel, Jack begins to display the telltale signs of drinking that Wendy has come to know so well. He constantly wipes his mouth with a napkin and chews Excedrin one after another. Jack’s temper worsens as well, and even Danny is reminded of “the Bad Thing.” After Danny is chased by the animal topiaries and tells Jack his unbelievable story, Jack accuses him of lying and slaps Danny across the face. Just as Jack did when he was drinking in Stovington, he again “loses his temper” and abuses Danny. Jack’s thoughts toward Wendy turn violent as well, and he is soon filled with thoughts of killing her. As Jack wipes his sore lips, he dreams of making Wendy “take her medicine. Every drop. Every last bitter drop,” in the form of his abuse. Even though Jack does not have access to alcohol, he shows all the symptoms of alcoholism, and his family suffers because of it.
When the Overlook Hotel finally convinces Jack to kill Wendy and Jack, it does so by getting him drunk. Lloyd, the bartender who mysteriously appears in the hotel’s haunted lounge, lines up gin martinis for Jack, and he immediately knocks them back. It is in this drunken stupor that Jack takes a roque mallet to his wife and threatens to kill his beloved son. Without alcohol, the hotel isn’t able to fully possess Jack and convince him to kill his family. With alcohol, however, Jack’s abusive nature appears, just as Grady’s presumably did, which underscores the deep connection between alcoholism and abuse.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Alcoholism and Abuse ThemeTracker
Alcoholism and Abuse Quotes in The Shining
“She creeps,” Watson said. “You tell that fat little peckerwood Ullman, he drags out the account books and spends three hours showing how we can’t afford a new one until 1982. I tell you, this whole place is gonna go sky-high someday, and I just hope that fat fuck’s here to ride the rocket.
The wanting, the needing to get drunk had never been so bad. His hands shook. He knocked things over. And he kept wanting to take it out on Wendy and Danny. His temper was like a vicious animal on a frayed leash. He had left the house in terror that he might strike them. Had ended up outside a bar, and the only thing that had kept him from going in was the knowledge that if he did, Wendy would leave him at last, and take Danny with her. He would be dead from the day they left.
I don’t believe such things.
But in sleep she did believe them, and in sleep, with her husband’s seed still drying on her thighs, she felt that the three of them had been permanently welded together—that if their three/oneness was to be destroyed, it would not be destroyed by any of them but from outside.
And still she agonized over it, looking for another alternative. She did not want to put Danny back within Jack’s reach. She was aware now that she had made one bad decision when she had gone against her feelings (and Danny’s) and allowed the snow to close them in . . . for Jack’s sake. Another bad decision when she had shelved the idea of divorce. Now she was nearly paralyzed by the idea that she might be making another mistake, one she would regret every minute of every day of the rest of her life.
“Then you start to see things, Lloydy-my-boy. Things you missed from the gutter. Like how the floor of the Wagon is nothing but straight pine boards, so fresh they’re still bleeding sap, and if you took your shoes off you’d be sure to get a splinter. Like how the only furniture in the Wagon is these long benches with high backs and no cushions to sit on, and in fact they are nothing but pews with a songbook every five feet or so. […] And somebody slams a song- book into your hands and says, ‘Sing it out, brother. If you expect to stay on this Wagon, you got to sing morning, noon, and night. Especially at night.’ And that’s when you realize what the Wagon really is, Lloyd. It’s a church with bars on the windows, a church for women and a prison for you.”
As the number 2 rose on the shaft wall, he threw the brass handle back to the home position and the elevator car creaked to a stop. He took his Excedrin from his pocket, shook three of them into his hand, and opened the elevator door. Nothing in the Overlook frightened him. He felt that he and it were simpático.
The thought rose up from nowhere, naked and unadorned. The urge to tumble her out of bed, naked, bewildered, just beginning to wake up; to pounce on her, seize her neck like the green limb of a young aspen and to throttle her, thumbs on windpipe, fingers pressing against the top of her spine, jerking her head up and ramming it back down against the floor boards, again and again, whamming, whacking, smashing, crashing. Jitter and jive, baby. Shake, rattle, and roll. He would make her take her medicine. Every drop. Every last bitter drop.
He had no idea what time it was, how long he had spent in the Colorado Lounge or how long he had been here in the ballroom. Time had ceased to matter.
“Gotcha!” he said, and began to grin. There was a stale odor of gin and olives about him that seemed to set off an old terror in her, a worse terror than any hotel could provide by itself A distant part of her thought that the worst thing was that it had all come back to this, she and her drunken husband.
“Oh Tony, is it my daddy?” Danny screamed. “Is it my daddy that’s coming to get me?’’
Tony didn’t answer. But Danny didn’t need an answer. He knew. A long and nightmarish masquerade party went on here, and had gone on for years. Little by little a force had accrued, as secret and silent as interest in a bank account. Force, presence, shape, they were all only words and none of them mattered. It wore many masks, but it was all one. Now, somewhere, it was coming for him. It was hiding behind Daddy’s face, it was imitating Daddy’s voice, it was wearing Daddy’s clothes.
