Read “The Shining” on Amazon

Before Stephen King begins his classic tale of a family falling apart inside a haunted resort, the Overlook, he introduced two epigrams, one of which originated from a Francisco Goya print. And which quote did King use?

Other articles I found have their interpretation of King’s inclusion of Goya’s phrase, but I have my own. Using that reference allowed me to deduce that the tool of reason, according to King, made the characters in The Shining mistakenly explain away suppressed problems that continuously torment them. These issues end up being “overlooked” (see what I did there?) and downplayed until the problems grow into something too monstrous and deadly for the characters to ignore.  

A prominent example is the Overlook itself. The text regularly mentions that the resort, while lovely and imposing in appearance, steadily declines physically despite management trying to maintain it as a high-end retreat for upper-class customers. King uses art to affirm this point by mentioning Ming-era porcelain, paper lanterns, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. By the end of the book, the Overlook will end up shattered and torn apart as easily as one can drop delicate wares and tear up paper decorations. Have other people noticed this theme?

There additionally exists an atmosphere of class divisions in the Overlook. The resort consisted of three floors, with the top level accommodating only the affluent and the elite. The second floor remains affordable to the upper-middle class. Jack Torrance even described the top floor as a Byzantine wonderland. He noted the second floor had a combination of a Roaring Twenties atmosphere with the refined air of a high-end sleeping car of the late nineteenth century. The first link I embedded supplies a condensed history of the Byzantine Empire, which reflects Overlook’s history created by the King. When I looked up Pullman cars (the novel references this type of sleeping car), my search engine gave me links to information about a strike that transpired against the Pullman company.

Another form of class divide and power play originates from Torrance battling management. After Jack practically blackmails his boss by proposing to write a book about Overlook’s troubled history, he nearly jeopardizes his and his family’s delicate financial status with permanent unemployment. Afterward, he felt offended that management, who had to fight to keep Overlook financially stable despite the negative publicity, shut Jack down completely. Beaten, Torrance compares himself to Renaissance-era artists who were not allowed to create unflattering portraits of the ruling family of that era, the Medicis. Torrance should have realized that Renaissance art pursued aesthetically pleasing concepts, not reality. However, research has led me to portraits of the Medicis, and painters did depict their subjects with wrinkles.

Then again, given how Torrance threatened to pen a tell-all book while in a vulnerable position, he does not come off as a wise man.

When the book reaches the end, the Torrances think about an artist’s use of visual art tricks that manipulate scenes, and if you look at one aspect of a painting, you will see the whole picture. Given how the characters directly reference Surrealism and the subconscious, they probably mean Salvador Dalí and his paintings such as Adolescence or Persistence of Memory.

Having mentioned Dalí, when I saw the Surrealists’ art in Saint Petersburg, Florida, I noticed his paintings had a sense of continuity. King himself is no different in his writing. For instance, the villain’s destruction at the end of the book reminded me of the villain’s end in King’s recent book, The Outsider.  King mentions that the Overlook’s caretaker Dick Halloran has a Saint Christopher’s Medal, which also appeared during my reading of Salem’s Lot.  The embedded link has a few medallions depicting the saint holding a child on his back. King has Halloran as Saint Christopher, helping Danny and Wendy escape a dangerous situation.