Jack Torrance thought: Officious little prick.
This is the opening line and here is our introduction to one Jack Torrance. What do we know from the get-go? Torrance has a rebellious streak. The object of this thought but unspoken putdown is Stuart Ullman, the man who is interviewing Jack for the job he hopes to get. The job he desperately hopes will be key to turning his life around. Jack, for all the flaws that will be soon revealed, is an artistic type. The Ullmans of the world are their nemesis. In their defense, however, without the Ullmans of the world, the Jack Torrances of the world would have to find jobs for which they are unseemly unsuited.
The whole place was empty.
But it wasn’t really empty. Because here in the Overlook things just went on and on. Here in the Overlook all times were one.
The “place” is, of course, the Overlook Hotel. Ghosts are immortal, it would seem, or—at the very least—the places they haunted. When confronted with such an assertion, however, a question must inevitably arise: if the Overlook Hotel were burned to the ground, would the ghosts stay, leave or what? Ignore the inevitable and just accept the assertion. The Overlook is haunted. Things go on and on “Forever. And Forever. And Forever.” Just like an alcoholic and his drinking, kind of.
He was still an alcoholic, always would be, perhaps had been since Sophomore Class Night in high school when he had taken his first drink.
Here is the crux at which the novel and the film adaptation diverge. For some reason, King thought it would be a really great idea to write a novel about alcoholism and disguise it as a ghost story. The film version by Kubrick has forever made that decision questionable. Kubrick’s film is about a caretaker who happens to enjoy a drink. King’s Jack Torrance is a drinker who happens to become a caretaker.
Somewhere in the maze of corridors behind him, the elevator came to a stop.
The central metaphorical symbolism of Kubrick’s film adaptation is the giant maze outside the Overlook. The only mention of a maze in the film is in regard to the labyrinthine hallways that Danny and Wendy must traverse to escape the Big Bad Jack. King does offer a metaphorical attraction outside the Overlook in the form of a topiary in which the animals move. In the world of CGI to which Kubrick did not have access, an argument could be made that a new film version more faithful to King’s vision is much more possible. Lacking the potential to make King’s literary imagination come to life on screen without producing laughter was the primary motivation—likely—for the transformation of into Kubrick’s maze. This particular passage, however, indicates that a new version could potentially meld the two metaphors into the same film. King, it must be asserted, does much his topiary to inspire dread and fear. On the other hand, by this point it seems almost impossible to imagine the story without the maze.
“Wasps don’t leave them in. That’s bees. They have barbed stingers. Wasp stingers are smooth. That’s what makes them so dangerous. They can sting again and again.”
A very strong argument can be made, however, that the most resonant symbol in the novel is not the topiary, but the wasp nest that Jack finds while going about his caretaking. A wasp in the house is almost always a powerful literary symbol of an unwanted, dangerous, but perfectly normal intrusion into the normalcy of domestic structure. And, for those who prefer to the film to the movie, this is precisely the main flaw of the book: too much off the natural and not enough of the supernatural. Or, to be even more precise: too much natural explanation of the supernatural. Nevertheless, another argument could be made that Kubrick ignored a powerful opportunity to inspire fear by leaving the wasps out. Wasps terrify for exactly the reason Jack suggests. Because they can sting “Forever. And Forever. And Forever.”
