A Comprehensive Analysis of Literary Protagonists - Sykalo Evgen 2023

Jack Torrance - “The Shining” by Stephen King

There’s a very specific kind of character you start recognizing once you’ve doomscrolled enough literary TikTok or survived one too many MFA workshops where someone compares their dad to Lear. Jack Torrance. Stephen King’s Jack. From The Shining. The man, the myth, the fire hazard in corduroy. Jack is not just a protagonist. He’s a slow-burning nervous breakdown dressed as a human. He’s what happens when “I’m doing this for my family” curdles into “I think the hallway just whispered at me.”

And yet, we still keep talking about him. Not just because Kubrick turned him into a Halloween mask (sorry, King), but because Jack Torrance—failed writer, alcoholic dad, part-time hotel caretaker, full-time descent into madness—is us. Or like... the version of us that never closed the tab on our intrusive thoughts.

Welcome to the ultimate anti-hero era, where we crave messy protagonists who spiral on page 237 and never really come back. Jack isn’t here for your redemption arc. He’s here to die in a hedge maze and scream at his kid through a bathroom door. And somehow? That’s exactly what makes him worth analyzing.

Who Was Jack Torrance Before the Ghosts? (Or: The Scariest Thing Might Just Be… Masculinity)

Let’s get something out of the way: Jack Torrance was unwell before the Overlook Hotel started whispering bloody nursery rhymes into his brain. This isn’t a haunted house story that begins with a happy nuclear family and ends in supernatural tragedy. No, King knows better than that. The horror here doesn’t start with ghosts. It starts with the fact that Jack was already one inch away from violence.

I mean—he breaks his toddler’s arm before they get to the hotel. That’s not subtle. That’s not, “oops, the hotel made me do it!” That’s a guy who’s walking around with a loaded past and a ticking clock. And yes, it’s about alcoholism. But it’s also about failure. Ego. Masculine fragility wrapped in tweed jackets and shitty plays no one wants to read.

There’s a whole subgenre of protagonists who see themselves as martyrs, but Jack? Jack is something worse. He thinks he's owed greatness. He’s got main character syndrome with a side of literary delusion. And King, bless him, absolutely skewers this. Jack isn’t just losing it because ghosts told him to. He’s losing it because he’s the type of man who thinks his trauma makes him profound—but it mostly just makes him dangerous.

And doesn’t that feel... familiar?

The Overlook Hotel: Literal Haunting Meets Metaphorical Hellscape (Or: Maybe the Ghosts Are Just Capitalism in Disguise?)

Let’s talk setting, because King never chooses spaces accidentally. The Overlook isn’t just haunted—it’s aggressively symbolic. A giant, isolated, corporate-owned vessel of American history and violence. If the hotel had a Tinder profile, it would say “I contain multitudes (of ghosts) and once hosted a gold ballroom full of colonialist nightmares.”

The hotel is like every toxic institution rolled into one—family, capitalism, the American Dream. Jack shows up thinking he can conquer it (write his book, stay sober, be good), but the Overlook just devours him. Not immediately. Slowly. Politely. Like, “Oh, Mr. Torrance, could we offer you some vintage trauma? Perhaps a murder memory from 1921?”

There’s this fantasy that writing—creating—will save you. Jack buys into that hard. But the Overlook is King’s way of saying: art won’t fix you if you’re already rotting inside. In fact, it’ll just give your demons better vocabulary. (See also: that type of guy who quotes Infinite Jest to justify ghosting you.)

Jack thinks he’s in control of the narrative. He’s not. He’s being rewritten the whole time, just like his dumb manuscript that he stops working on around the same time he starts hallucinating cocktail parties. The Overlook doesn’t possess Jack. It confirms him.

Wendy and Danny: The Mirror (and the Wound)

One of the most overlooked things (ha) about The Shining is how Jack doesn’t exist in a vacuum. He’s surrounded by characters who survive him—his wife Wendy and his psychic kid Danny. And here’s the thing: Wendy and Danny aren’t “supporting” characters in a traditional sense. They’re counterweights. They’re like, emotionally competent foils to Jack’s escalating Reddit-thread-of-a-mindset.

Wendy is the classic horror wife on paper. Fragile. Nervous. “Hysterical.” But no—Wendy fights. She defends. She escapes. While Jack monologues about greatness and destiny and All Work And No Play, Wendy’s dragging her traumatized child down a snowy mountain because someone has to do the actual survival around here.

And Danny? He’s the ghost of Jack’s inner child—but unbroken. Sensitive, intuitive, literally shining. The contrast couldn’t be louder. Jack sees Danny’s power and instead of protecting it, he tries to destroy it. Why? Because Jack isn’t just haunted by the past—he’s threatened by the possibility of a future where someone turns out better than him.

He’s not a villain. That’s too clean. He’s a father who can’t stand being outgrown. There’s nothing more terrifying than that, especially in a culture where “being a man” means you’re supposed to be the story’s author, not just a chapter someone escapes from.

Kubrick vs. King: Two Jacks, Same Tragedy

Let’s rip the bandage off. King famously hated Kubrick’s film. Said it flattened Jack. Made him evil from the jump. And yeah—Nicholson plays Jack like he’s already halfway to murder when he checks in. But honestly? That’s the point.

Kubrick’s version strips away the ambiguity and shows us what King hints at: Jack was never okay. Nicholson’s manic grin is just a visual version of King’s slow-drip dread. Both Jacks are tragic. One is more psychological, the other more theatrical—but both are circling the same drain: a man so convinced he’s exceptional that the world starts warping to match his delusion.

Film Jack is scarier. Book Jack is sadder. But they’re both cautionary tales about a very specific kind of masculinity: the kind that confuses vulnerability with failure, rage with righteousness, obsession with genius. Sound familiar? It should. You probably went to college with five of him. Or dated one.

So What Is Jack Torrance, Really?

Jack is the anxiety dream of every burnt-out creative, every disappointed father, every American who thought they were the protagonist until the narrative swallowed them whole. He’s the moment you realize you’re not making art—you’re just screaming into a void and calling it literature. He’s a metaphor for institutional failure, for emotional rot, for what happens when men aren’t taught how to feel so they turn feelings into fists or fantasies.

He’s not a villain. He’s a symptom.

Of what? Pick your poison. Patriarchy. Capitalism. Substance abuse. Ego. The MFA-to-McDonald’s pipeline. Take your pick. Jack’s the ghost story we tell ourselves when we want to believe the bad thing isn’t us—it’s the hotel. The influence. The curse. But really?

We were the Overlook all along.

No Neat Endings. Just This.

Jack dies frozen in the snow. Alone. He never finishes his book. He never gets better. He doesn’t even get a posthumous redemption. And maybe that’s the only honest ending he could have.

Because if Jack had lived—if he’d said “sorry” and gone to therapy and written a bestselling memoir about conquering his demons—we’d have let ourselves off the hook too easily. But The Shining doesn’t care about clean arcs. It cares about the cost of pretending the ghosts aren’t real.

Spoiler: they are.

And they look a lot like us.