Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Symbolism? Overlook or rage?

I feel like i might be stretching, but I really want to believe that there is some sort of symbolism in the way that the book ended. I'm not sure how deeply i want to take this, because of King's relatively point blank style of writing. I wouldn't call it something as harsh as shallow, but I can't see him making a big commentary on the way of the world. Anyways, I'll start off with the biggest and most grandiose possibility. In the ending, I think that King may have been hinting at some sort of commentary on the way of man to follow false idols and leaders. The way that Jack gets taken over and forced ALMOST to kill his son rings a little to the tune of a religious metaphor to christianity specifically, with a, "abraham killing Isaac" kinda deal. I'll say again that I think that one was a stretch, but I'm just throwing out some examples here. Another, less dramatic symbol could be the boiler and ultimate destruction of the overlook as Jack's rage/drinking, but that one as well I think is flawed, because King already illustrated that so beautifully in the awesome wasp's nest thing. Please in the comments say if you see anything like this, because a lot of ideas pop into my head with a book like this, but I'd really like to hear you guys.

Actually, i want to talk about one last, completely unrelated thing. I was just thinking about my original blog post about jack's rage in connection with the wasp's nest. Personally, i don't think that Jack's craziness was his rage and his problem. I think that it was the overlook. Also, i still don't think that Jack's fits of rage were him either. So, where I'm going with this is that the wasps attacked Jack earlier when he was fixing the roof. Then they went away, and finally they attacked Danny and were killed. The attacking Danny was obviously Jack trying to kill him (Which i think was completely the overlook taking him over). Therefore, I think that the wasps when they stung him on the roof was his hitting the student. If the wasps symbolize the overlook's influence when they sting Danny, they have to symbolize that when they sting Jack, indicating that when he attacked Jack, it was not his rage or his fault, but it was the overlook extending its influence to jack to bring him there. BOOM. That might be really hard to follow, so if you don't get it, I'll try and explain it to you next class.

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