Don Torrance

Don Torrance is the paternal ancestor whose family story gives Dan a way to discuss violence across generations with Abra. A male nurse who relied on a cane after a car accident, Don attacked his wife and then helped conceal what he had done. Dan’s account places that episode beside later violence by Don’s son, Jack Torrance, without presenting the family pattern as an excuse or an unchangeable fate.

Identity and Family Background

Don was a male nurse, a profession Dan described as close to his own work as an orderly. A car accident badly injured Don’s leg, and he used a cane toward the end of his life. He was Jack’s father and, through Jack, Dan’s grandfather and Abra’s great-grandfather.

Don also belongs to the family history that Dan uses to explain his newly discovered relationship with Lucy Stone. Dan tells Lucy that they share a father, Jack, making Don their paternal grandfather. The relationship is established through the family line; Don himself is absent from the present-day scenes in which it is disclosed.

The Account of Violence

Dan recounts that one evening at the dinner table, Don began striking his wife with his cane without an apparent reason. When she fell, Don continued the assault. Their sons, Brett and Mike, intervened and pulled him away. The account reaches Dan through family testimony: he relates what his father told his mother, rather than describing an event he witnessed.

Afterward, Don knelt beside his injured wife with a small medical kit and tried to treat her. He told the doctor that she had fallen down the stairs. Don’s wife and children supported that explanation. Dan says they did so because they were afraid. The juxtaposition of Don’s medical care and his false account does not undo the attack; it shows how the family’s immediate response also helped keep the truth hidden.

The Pattern Across Generations

Dan tells Abra this history while explaining that violence has appeared more than once in their family. Long after Don’s death, Jack broke Dan’s arm. At the Overlook Hotel, where Roof O’ the World now stands, Jack nearly beat Dan’s mother to death, using a roque mallet rather than a cane. The different weapons sharpen the connection between the episodes: the later violence recalls the earlier one even as it belongs to another generation.

Don’s place in this history is therefore both specific and limited. The account establishes what he did, how his family concealed it, and how Dan links it to later abuse; it does not establish that Don alone explains the actions of his descendants. Dan presents the history to Abra as something she should know, not as a verdict on what she must become.

Narrative Role

Don appears through recollection, as Dan turns family history into a difficult explanation for Abra’s own anger and capacity for harm. Abra resists hearing the story, and Dan responds that it is history rather than a lesson with a simple moral. His account lets the novel trace a line of repeated violence while preserving the distinction between inheritance and choice: the past informs the present, but it does not by itself determine Abra’s actions.