Jack Torrance and Mark Torrance

The relationship between Jack Torrance and his father, Mark Torrance, is the central, unhealed wound of Jack's life, a legacy of violence and addiction that the Overlook Hotel exploits with devastating precision. Mark Torrance, a male nurse at the Berlin Community Hospital, was a towering, fat man who dominated his family through unpredictable brutality. Jack's earliest memories are a mixture of desperate love and abject terror: he would wait in the hall for his father to return from work, playing with his trucks, hoping to be swept up in the "elevator game"—a drunken ritual where his father would hurl him toward the ceiling. But the game could end in a splintering crash, and his father's bearish good humor could turn without warning into boarish bellowing and the smack of his "good right hand." This volatile dynamic taught Jack that love and violence were inseparable, a lesson the Overlook would later use to corrupt his own role as a father.

The Cycle of Abuse and Internalization

The defining trauma of Jack's childhood occurred at the supper table when he was nine. His father, after a three-day drinking binge, suddenly and without warning beat Jack's mother with his gold-headed cane, striking her seven times across the face and head while shouting, "Now. Now by Christ. I guess you'll take your medicine now." The phrase "take your medicine" becomes a recurring motif in Jack's own violence, a direct inheritance from his father. Jack's mother, dazed and bleeding, corroborated his father's lie that she had fallen down the stairs, a betrayal that shattered the family. Jack's older brother Brett joined the Army in disgust, and the family disintegrated. Jack internalized his father's rage, not his mother's passivity. He remembers himself at seven, spanked for playing with matches, then hurling a rock at a passing car; when his father blacked his eye for that, Jack kicked a stray dog into the gutter. This pattern of being acted upon and then acting out—the passive mode followed by explosive violence—becomes Jack's own script.

The Ghost-God and the Overlook's Temptation

Mark Torrance died of a stroke when Jack was thirteen, but his influence never died. In Jack's dreams, his father appears as a "Ghost-God" or "Pig-God," a voice that commands him to kill. During a sleepwalking episode at the Overlook, Jack smashes the CB radio, believing he hears his father's voice on it, telling him, "You have to kill him, Jacky, and her, too." The Overlook, sensing Jack's vulnerability, resurrects this paternal ghost. In the Colorado Lounge, Jack hallucinates a bartender named Lloyd, and later, the ghost of Delbert Grady—the previous caretaker who murdered his own family—appears to Jack, speaking in the same cadences of paternal authority and discipline that Mark Torrance used. Grady tells Jack that his son Danny is "willful" and needs to be "corrected," echoing Mark Torrance's language of punishment. The hotel offers Jack the position of "manager" if he will sacrifice his family, a direct replay of the bargain Jack's own father made with his demons: the father's authority purchased at the cost of the family's safety.

The Final Inheritance

In his final confrontation with Danny, Jack, now fully possessed by the Overlook, chases his son with a roque mallet, shouting the same words his father used: "Now you'll take your medicine." The hotel has completed its work, transforming Jack into a copy of his father—a violent, drunken patriarch who sees his family as obstacles to his own fulfillment. But in a moment of lucidity, Jack's true self breaks through the mask. He tells Danny, "Run away. Quick. And remember how much I love you." This is Jack's final, tragic act: he recognizes that he has become his father, and the only love he can offer his son is to let him go. The Overlook's power is broken not by Jack's strength, but by his acknowledgment of his own weakness and his choice to break the cycle, even at the cost of his own life. The relationship between Jack and Mark Torrance is thus the novel's deepest tragedy: a son who spent his life trying not to become his father, only to find that the hotel had been waiting to make him one all along.