Hatchet

The hatchet is the weapon Delbert Grady used to murder his two young daughters during the winter of 1970–71 at the Overlook Hotel, and it becomes a recurring symbol of domestic violence, inherited rage, and the hotel's power to turn a caretaker against his own family. Though it never physically appears in the present-day narrative, the hatchet haunts the story as a remembered instrument of atrocity, a parallel to Jack Torrance's own capacity for violence, and a foreshadowing of the roque mallet he later wields. Its presence in the hotel's history establishes a pattern of caretaker-on-family murder that the Overlook seeks to repeat.

History and the Grady Family Murders

The hatchet is first mentioned by Stuart Ullman during Jack Torrance's job interview. Ullman recounts that Delbert Grady, the previous winter caretaker, "murdered the little girls with a hatchet, his wife with a shotgun, and himself the same way" . The detail of the hatchet is specific and chilling: it was not a gun or a knife but a chopping tool, suggesting a methodical, brutal, and intimate act of killing. Watson, the maintenance man, later confirms the story, adding that the bodies were found "froze solid" in the west wing on the third floor, and that the girls were "eight and six" and "cute as cut-buttons" (E00166–E00167). The hatchet thus becomes the defining object of the Grady tragedy, the tool that transformed a family into frozen corpses.

Symbolic Echoes in Jack Torrance's Violence

The hatchet's symbolic weight transfers to Jack Torrance as his own violent impulses surface. When Jack breaks Danny's arm, the narrative describes the sound of the bone snapping as "a sound like a breaking pencil lead or a small piece of kindling when you brought it down over your knee" (E00132–E00133) — a simile that evokes the splitting of wood, the same action a hatchet performs. Later, when Jack attacks Wendy with the roque mallet, the mallet becomes a surrogate hatchet: it is a short-handled striking tool, and Jack uses it with the same methodical brutality Grady used on his daughters. The parallel is made explicit when Jack, in his drunken hallucination, hears Grady's voice urging him to "chastise" his son, and when Grady himself appears as a bartender who speaks of "correcting" his own girls . The hatchet is never seen, but its logic — a father killing his children with a bludgeoning tool — is reenacted through the mallet.

The Hatchet as a Figure of Inherited Rage

The hatchet also connects Jack's violence to his own father's abuse. Jack recalls his father beating his mother with a cane, and the phrase "take your medicine" — which Grady's ghost and later Jack himself use — links the hatchet murders to Jack's childhood trauma . The hatchet thus becomes a figure for the inheritance of domestic violence: Grady used it on his daughters; Jack's father used a cane on his wife; Jack himself uses a mallet on his wife and son. The Overlook, by resurrecting Grady's memory and placing the hatchet at the center of its mythology, actively encourages this repetition. When Danny confronts the thing wearing his father's face, it speaks in Grady's cadences, threatening to "chastise" him "harshly" . The hatchet is the hotel's preferred instrument for breaking the family bond.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

The hatchet never appears as a physical object in the main narrative — it is only a memory, a story told by Ullman and Watson. Yet its absence makes it more potent: it exists as a threat, a precedent, and a template. The Overlook does not need to produce the actual hatchet; it only needs to make Jack into a man who would use one. The hatchet thus functions as a narrative prosthesis for the hotel's malevolent will, a historical weapon that the present seeks to reforge. Its final echo comes when Danny, cornered on the third floor, realizes that the thing chasing him is not his father but a "false face" wearing his father's image, and that the hotel's ultimate goal is to make Jack into another Grady — a man who will take up the hatchet (or its equivalent) and destroy his own family (E04017–E04021). The hatchet, though never swung in the present, defines the stakes of the entire winter.