New Year's

New Year's serves as a crucial temporal landmark in the Overlook Hotel's winter isolation, marking Jack Torrance's self-imposed deadline for finishing his play The Little School and a symbolic turning point in the family's descent into crisis. The holiday, which Jack envisions as a milestone of personal redemption and creative achievement, instead becomes the threshold beyond which his psychological stability and the hotel's malevolent influence become indistinguishable.

Jack's Creative Deadline and the New Year's Goal

Jack Torrance sets New Year's as the target date for completing a clean copy of his play, a goal that represents his hope for personal and professional rehabilitation after the disasters at Stovington Preparatory Academy. He believes that finishing the play by the end of the year will close the door on his past failures, including his alcoholism, the broken arm he inflicted on his son Danny, and the violent assault on student George Hatfield. The play itself, The Little School, is a symbolic exorcism of his own demons, and Jack's progress on it during the early weeks at the Overlook gives him a sense of healing and purpose. He tells himself that once the play is done and sent to his agent, he can turn to other projects, perhaps a book of short stories, and leave the bad years behind.

The Unraveling of the New Year's Promise

As the weeks pass, Jack's writing stalls, and his focus shifts obsessively to the Overlook's dark history, which he uncovers in a scrapbook in the basement. His creative energy is diverted into researching the hotel's violent past, including its connections to organized crime, murder, and corruption. The New Year's deadline becomes increasingly unrealistic as Jack's behavior regresses: he chews Excedrin compulsively, wipes his lips constantly, and experiences hallucinations, including the hedge animals moving and the dead woman in Room 217. His wife Wendy observes that all his old drinking symptoms have returned except the drink itself, and she notes that he has not been able to finish the play. The approaching holiday, rather than marking a fresh start, becomes a countdown to catastrophe.

The Collapse of Time and Identity

By the time the snow isolates the Overlook completely, the New Year's deadline has lost all meaning. Jack's sense of time dissolves as he becomes increasingly possessed by the hotel's malevolent force. He hallucinates a bartender named Lloyd and drinks imaginary martinis, relapsing into the alcoholism he had fought to overcome. The hotel's influence erodes his identity, and he begins to see himself as the rightful caretaker and eventual manager of the Overlook, a position he believes requires the sacrifice of his wife and son. The New Year's that was supposed to mark his rebirth instead becomes the occasion for his final transformation into a murderous instrument of the hotel's will.

The Aftermath: A New Year Without Resolution

After the Overlook's destruction and the family's rescue, the New Year's deadline is never mentioned again. The holiday that Jack had invested with so much hope becomes another casualty of the hotel's violence, a broken promise that underscores the impossibility of redemption within the Overlook's walls. For Danny and Wendy, the new year that follows is one of physical and psychological recovery, but the trauma of the winter remains. The New Year's that Jack had envisioned as a clean slate is replaced by a long, uncertain process of healing, a reminder that some thresholds, once crossed, cannot be undone.