Isolation is a major factor in Stephen King’s The Shining. The Overlook Hotel is situated deep in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, miles from the nearest town. Winter storms block roadways and cripple phone lines, cutting the Torrance family off from the rest of the world. The expansive vistas outside the Overlook’s massive windows are beautiful, but they are a constant reminder of how alone the Torrances are at the hotel. Wendy is acutely aware of the dangers of their isolation—getting help at the hotel in the dead of winter will be nearly impossible—and this feeling only intensifies when the hotel begins to show its sinister side. In addition to the isolating effects of the hotel’s physical location, Jack is struggling with his alcoholism and Danny is trying to understand his ability to “shine,” both of which are isolating in their own right. When Jack accepts the job at the Overlook, the hotel’s manager, Mr. Ullman, warns him that “solitude can be damaging,” and this indeed proves to be the case. Isolation is particularly damaging to both Jack and Danny, and they both begin to display signs of insanity. King draws a clear parallel between isolation and insanity within The Shining, and in doing so he effectively argues that isolation can have a profound and transformative effect on the human mind.
Danny, who is already psychologically isolated by his psychic abilities, is further secluded by the remote nature of the hotel. This isolation compounds Danny’s fear in the evil hotel, which has serious effects on his mental health. Before Danny meets the chef, Dick Hallorann, who can also “shine,” he has no one to talk to about his psychic abilities, which, to a five-year-old boy, is particularly isolating. Danny worries that his father will call “THE MEN IN THE WHITE COATS to take him to the SANNY-TARIUM.” Alone in his thoughts, Danny constantly worries that he is insane. As Danny plays alone in the hotel, he in a constant state of fear. Between the ghost of room 217, the evil topiaries guarding the hotel entrance, and the aggressive dogman at the elevator, Danny is sure the hotel is out to get him—and with no one to confirm his experiences, he thinks he is going crazy. He even regresses back to thumb-sucking and demands a night-light, which are evidence of Danny’s building mental stress. After Danny goes into room 217 alone and is chased by the bloated corpse of Mrs. Massey, who died in that room, Danny is reduced to a catatonic state. Wendy and Jack grow increasingly worried about Danny’s mental health and take him to see Dr. Edmond, a doctor in the nearby town of Sidewinder, before the snow closes in. While Dr. Edmond finds nothing definitively wrong with Danny, the young boy’s mental health continues to deteriorate at the secluded hotel.
Jack, too, is isolated, both by his alcoholism and the secluded nature of the Overlook Hotel. He begins to show signs of insanity as well, which again suggests that seclusion can have serious implications for one’s mental health. One day in the early fall, while Wendy and Danny are in Sidewinder doing some early Christmas shopping, Jack goes out to the animal topiaries to trim them and swears he sees the giant lions move. When Jack saw such things in his drinking days, he called it withdrawal, but now he just calls it “insanity.” Like Danny, Jack is alone with no one to confirm his experiences. Thus, he is convinced he is going crazy. After Jack finds a scrapbook in the basement that outlines the Overlook’s sordid past, he begins spending more time alone in the hotel’s basement and attic looking for additional information. Jack is a writer, and he is determined to write a book about the hotel, even though Mr. Ullman and Al Shockley, Jack’s friend who secured his job and sits on the hotel’s Board of Directors, strictly forbid it. Jack spends hours alone, obsessively researching the hotel even though it may cost him his job, which again points to his deteriorating mental health. The more time that Jack spends alone in the hotel, the further he slips into insanity. He hallucinates a bartender named Lloyd, and he even believes that the gin martini in front of him is real. But then Lloyd and the martini are gone in the blink of an eye, and Jack is left with the “cold certainty” that he is “losing his mind.” Jack’s isolation, stemming from both his alcoholism and the hotel, has a serious effect on his sanity.
Just as the isolating nature of the evil Overlook Hotel drove the previous winter caretaker, Grady, to absolute insanity, the hotel hopes to do the same to Jack. In a murderous rage, Grady murdered his family and killed himself, and as Jack’s own sanity unravels, he contemplates the very same thing. While Danny and Wendy are ultimately saved—due to a combination of Hallorann’s heroic efforts, Wendy’s determination, and Jack’s love for Danny—Jack is killed when the hotel’s boiler explodes while he is deep in the throes of a psychotic break. The maddening seclusion of the hotel drives Jack to insanity and results in his death, which proves King’s central claim that isolation often has damaging psychological effects.
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Isolation and Insanity ThemeTracker
Isolation and Insanity 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.
Danny, who had been frightened as well as lonely sometimes, nodded. “Am I the only one you ever met?” he asked.
Hallorann laughed and shook his head. “No, child, no. But you shine the hardest.”
“Are there lots, then?”
“No,” Hallorann said, “but you do run across them. A lot of folks, they got a little bit of shine to them. They don’t even know it. But they always seem to show up with flowers when their wives are feelin blue with the monthlies, they do good on school tests they don’t even study for, they got a good idea how people are feelin as soon as they walk into a room. I come across fifty or sixty like that. But maybe only a dozen, countin my gram, that knew they was shinin.”
They watched until the car was out of sight, headed down the eastern slope. When it was gone, the three of them looked at each other for a silent, almost frightened moment. They were alone. Aspen leaves whirled and skittered in aimless packs across the lawn that was now neatly mowed and tended for no guest’s eyes. There was no one to see the autumn leaves steal across the grass but the three of them. It gave Jack a curious shrinking feeling, as if his life force had dwindled to a mere spark while the hotel and the grounds had suddenly doubled in size and become sinister, dwarfing them with sullen, inanimate power.
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.
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.
His mother was still a little bit afraid, but his father’s attitude was strange. It was a feeling that he had done something that was very hard and had done it right. But Danny could not seem to see exactly what the something was. His father was guarding that carefully, even in his own mind. Was it possible, Danny wondered, to be glad you had done something and still be so ashamed of that something that you tried not to think of it? The question was a disturbing one. He didn’t think such a thing was possible…in a normal mind.
Around him, he could hear the Overlook Hotel coming to life.
It was hard to say just how he knew, but he guessed it wasn’t greatly different from the perceptions Danny had from time to time…like father, like son. Wasn’t that how it was popularly expressed?
All the hotel’s eras were together now, all but this current one, the Torrance Era. And this would be together with the rest very soon now. That was good. That was very good.
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.
“For instance, you show a great interest in learning more about the Overlook Hotel. Very wise of you, sir. Very noble. A certain scrapbook was left in the basement for you to find—”
What would she do if he came at her right now, she wondered. If he should pop up from behind the dark, varnished registration desk with its pile of triplicate forms and its little silver-plated bell, like some murderous jack-in-the-box, pun intended, a grinning jack-in- the-box with a cleaver in one hand and no sense at all left behind his eyes. Would she stand frozen with terror, or was there enough of the primal mother in her to fight him for her son until one of them was dead? She didn’t know. The very thought made her sick—made her feel that her whole life had been a long and easy dream to lull her helplessly into this waking nightmare.
“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.
