The Shining

At its most basic, the Overlook Hotel is a symbol of evil, decadence, and an endless appetite for suffering. Its sordid history is a testament to its dark magnetism. Watson tells Jack, “Any big hotels have got scandals…Just like every big hotel has got a ghost. Why? Hell, people come and go. Sometimes one of em will pop off in his room, heart attack or stroke or something like that. Hotels are superstitious places” (20). Despite the ghosts and superstitions, Jack quickly feels possessive of the place. During the phone call, he screams at Ullman: “It’s not your hotel!” (182), before hanging up. The Overlook eventually symbolizes Jack’s last hope of having something like a destiny. In Jack’s mind, it is an important place, and its caretaker must therefore be an important man.

Wendy hates the hotel and quickly understands that it has designs on Danny: “Something in this hotel wants him” (261), and “Whatever he has, this hotel is making it worse” (267). For her, the Overlook symbolizes a threat to her son. For his part, Danny instantly understands that the Overlook is a bad place. Late in the novel, he thinks, “the hotel was running things now” (337). When the hotel burns, King anthropomorphizes the Overlook, writing that the windows look like eyes, and the front doors a gaping mouth.

Just as the job at the Overlook is Jack’s last chance at regaining some sort of financial stability, the idea of his play, The Little School, could be Jack’s last chance to return to the prestige of writing. He uses the winter at the Overlook as a chance to have the solitude and time that a writer needs to create a great work of art. However, the play comes to symbolize more for him:

[Jack] felt in a way that the play itself, the whole thing, was the roadblock, a colossal symbol of the bad years at Stovington prep, the marriage he had almost totaled like a nutty kid behind the wheel of an old jalopy, the monstrous assault on his son, the incident in the parking lot with George Hatfield (104).

The play eventually represents everything that has ever gone wrong for Jack. 

There are two instances of wasps’ nest in the novel. While Jack is reshingling the roof at the Overlook, he finds a wasps’ nest. He sprays it with a bug bomb and then gives the nest to Danny, thinking it will be an interesting decoration for his room. That night, the wasps—many of which are still alive—crawl out and sting Danny. In Jack’s past, he remembers his father setting a wasps’ nest on fire and the wasps popping like popcorn. In each case, Jack associates the nests and the wasps with a hidden threat. The wasps represent his sense of personal grievance and commitment to fighting back when he thinks, “You could be stung, but you could also sting back” (115). When he is locked in the pantry later in the novel, Jack plots against Danny and Wendy as he tells himself: “Living by your wits is always knowing where the wasps’ are” (381). The wasps represent the constant threat of hidden attacks by creatures that hide within or beneath facades that appear safe.