The Shining By Stephen King Essay

While Stephen King is renowned for being a writer of paranormal fiction, it is most often his hinting towards the possibility of the supernatural that is most disturbing. Although The Shining may be most readily associated with impossible monsters made to imitate childhood nightmares, the intimate way in which these horrors are woven into the fabrics of reality offer readers a sense of truth in relation to the terrors of the unknown. By overshadowing supernatural elements with domestic terrors and implementing the impossible into the contemporary world that the readers can easily associate with, King creates a sense of plausibility in even the most unlikely of apparitions. Themes of abuse, bullying, the fallout from childhood trauma, and domestic
Although King may be somewhat dismissive of what he calls “Freudian huggermugger”, there is certainly much of his work pertaining to elements of psychoanalytic horror. In his Preface of the 2001 revised version of The Shining, King directly proposes the connection between the supernatural and the human psyche, thus making Freudian observations rhetoric a means by stating that “memories are the ghosts of our lives” (pxii). If anything, the palpability of horror is actually further accentuated through the indirect incorporation of Freudian theories into the narrative of the story, where King investigates the Uncanny, the Trio, the Double, Dreams and Repressed memories. Through their integration into the setting and characterisation of Jack Torrance in The Shining, King is able to create a nuance between reality and imaginative terror; thus suggesting that true horror lies in the repressed dreams and trauma in our past. And it is precisely the disturbing authenticity of the human element in savagery that makes The Shining such a successful piece of Gothic
The basement symbolises the ‘id’ of Jack’s mind, where impulses and unseen secrets are kept. Accordingly, the ‘ego’ can be allocated to the ground floor, where the Torrance family inhibits, and where Jack’s thinking and actions are dictated predominantly by his set of morals and logical thinking. Finally, the ‘superego’ is represented by the top level of the hotel, where the climatic fight between Jack (‘id’) and Danny (‘ego’) occurs. The Overlook is also rife with memories in each of its rooms and crevices. It contains the dark history of the hotel, but once again, it also reflects the memories or fears of its residents. From corpses in the Presidential Suite, to a dead George Hatfield (or rather, Jack’s memory of George Hatfield) in Room 217, the Overlook is presented as a haunting house of