Time Theme Analysis

While it is certainly a lesser theme in the novel, time nevertheless plays an important role in Stephen King’s The Shining. The Overlook Hotel is itself an old building, and it is alive with decades of history. It has a colorful and sordid past, and like many hotels, years of guests and passing emotions have left an imprint on the Overlook. Essentially, the living are able to observe and interact with the dead at the hotel—for instance, a masquerade ball from 1945 plays out perpetually in the Overlook’s formal ballroom, and blood can still be seen on the walls outside the Presidential Suite from a shooting that happened in 1966. The scrapbook that Jack finds in the hotel’s basement, which fuels his obsessive search for the hotel’s story, also carries connotations of time and history. Time is somewhat warped and frozen at the Overlook Hotel, and a moment of terror in room 217 or near the animal topiaries can seem like an eternity. Through the complex and often disorienting nature of time in The Shining, King effectively argues that time isn’t really as linear or predictable as people like to think.

At the Overlook Hotel, “all time is one,” meaning all the events that have ever taken place there unfold simultaneously, complicating one’s sense of time. It is “an endless night in August of 1945,” while at the same time, the infamous murders of 1966, in which the bodyguards of mob boss Vittorio Gienelli are gunned down outside the Presidential Suite, also happen over and over again. It is as if the entire hotel is “wound up with a silver key,” and all time unfolds at once. All of the hotel’s eras come together, and in the east-wing ballroom, numerous different celebrations, conventions, and business meetings occur “at the same time within temporal centimeters of each other.” Time collapses at the Overlook Hotel as every time period is joined as one. In the hotel’s dining room, decades of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners are “served simultaneously,” and the memory of past guests occupy all the rooms. The roque court is full and so is the hotel’s bar, the Colorado Lounge. Time, King writes, “ceases to matter” at the Overlook Hotel, which further underscores time’s relativity.

Despite the relative nature of time in the novel, a clock sits protected by a glass dome on the mantel in the ballroom and constantly ticks, keeping time until the hotel’s final end. The clock, which was donated to the Overlook by a Swiss diplomat in 1949, is a symbol of time’s relativity within the novel, and it keeps time within the multiple eras that each unfold at the hotel. Danny is the first to notice the clock in the ballroom, and even though he thinks the clock is probably something he shouldn’t touch, he winds it. With the winding of the clock, the novel’s climax is set into motion, and as Danny frantically calls for Hallorann’s help all the way in Florida, Jack begins to go insane and threaten their lives. As Wendy runs through the hotel trying to evade Jack and save her life and Danny’s, she listens to the clock in the ballroom chime. As the clock strikes midnight, she hears echoes of “Unmask! Unmask! Unmask!” and when she turns around, Jack is standing before her, insane and holding a roque mallet. The clock counts down both the minutes to the unmasking at the ball in 1945 and the moment Jack is finally revealed as a murderous lunatic. At the end of the novel, Dick Hallorann notices a moment before the hotel’s boiler explodes that the hands of the clock in the ballroom are situated at one minute to midnight. The hotel blows up a moment later, ostensibly at midnight, which suggests the clock has been ticking down to the hotel’s destruction. While the clock keeps time for multiple eras, the current era, “the Torrance Era,” as Jack calls it, is the most important.

The frozen and conflicted nature of time and history in The Shining deepens the fear and mystery that is the Overlook Hotel, and the simultaneous unfolding of different eras further underscores King’s argument that, in Jack’s words, “time is relative, baby.”