Literary Allusions
Geoffrey Cocks notes that the film contains many allusions to fairy tales, both Hansel and Gretel and the story of the big bad wolf, with Jack Torrance identified as the wolf which Bruno Bettelheim identifies as standing for "all the asocial unconscious devouring powers" that must be overcome by a child's ego.
The saying "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" appeared first in James Howell's Proverbs in English, Italian, French and Spanish (1659).
Read more about this topic: The Shining (film)
Famous quotes containing the word literary:
“The art of writing books is not yet invented. But it is at the point of being invented. Fragments of this nature are literary seeds. There may be many an infertile grain among them: nevertheless, if only some come up!”
—Novalis [Friedrich Von Hardenberg] (1772–1801)