Summary
Having settled into life at the hotel, Wendy brings Jack his breakfast (eggs, sunny side up) while Danny rides his toy bicycle through the hotel hallways. Shocked that he slept as late as 11:30 in the morning, Jack admits that he's never been more comfortable or happy before. Wendy admits she was scared of living alone in such a big place when they first arrived, but Jack says he fell in love with the hotel immediately, citing a mysteriously powerful feeling of déjà vu.
Wendy asks Jack to accompany her on a walk, but he declines, saying he has to get some writing done before the day is over. Wendy assures him that he'll get into a productive writing routine soon, and he responds snarkily, "Yep, that's all it is."
Later, Jack throws a tennis ball against the walls of the Colorado Room, bouncing it off the Native American murals. His typewriter sits on a table, unused. Outside, Wendy and Danny explore the hedge maze. Jack's tennis ball bounces down the hall into the lobby, and he goes after it, happening upon a scale model of the hedge maze. He towers over it and watches as tiny figures of his wife and son navigate the maze; it is unclear whether this is in Jack's imagination or not. A moment later, life-size Wendy and Danny reach the center of the maze outside.
The next day, Wendy prepares food in the kitchen while a TV plays the news. A news story airs about a woman who went missing while on a hunting trip in Aspen with her husband. It also mentions that an incoming snowstorm may force the police to call of the search party for the woman.
Again, Danny rides through the hotel hallways on his bicycle and stops in front of Room 237. He tries the doorknob but it's locked. An image of the two twins he saw a month earlier flashes through his head.
In the Colorado Room, Jack types furiously. Wendy enters and asks how the writing is going. He replies tersely until she asks if he'd like the sandwich she made him, which seems to set him off. He explains rudely that when Wendy interrupts his writing, she breaks his concentration, and makes a rule that whenever he's writing, she can't enter the room. He then asks her to start now and to "get the fuck out of here." She obeys.
The next day, Wendy and Danny play in the snow while Jack stares out the window at them, wearing a deranged expression.
Two days later, Wendy attempts to use the hotel's telephones and finds that they don't work. She tries the radio in Mr. Ullman's office and connects with nearby park rangers, who inform her that it's common for the phone lines of the hotel to go out of service all winter. They also tell her that the area is experiencing some of the worst snowstorms in years.
While riding his bicycle through the hotel, Danny encounters the twins he saw a month earlier. They ask him to come play with them "forever and ever and ever," as Danny sees flashing visions of the same twins lying in pools of blood next to an axe. He covers his eyes, and when he opens them, the twins are gone. He tells Tony he's scared, and Tony instructs him to remember what Dick Hallorann said: that these images aren't real, but like pictures in a book.
A couple of days later, Wendy and Danny watch TV in the hotel lobby. Danny asks his mother if he can retrieve his toy fire engine from his room, but Wendy says no, because Jack is sleeping there. Danny promises to tiptoe in order to avoid waking up Jack, and Wendy consents.
When Danny enters the family's apartment, however, Jack is wide awake and sitting up in bed, looking out the window. Jack asks him to come sit next to him and asks Danny if he's having a good time at the hotel. Danny replies that he is and asks Jack if he feels bad. Jack replies that he's not feeling bad but is merely tired, and that he wishes they could all stay in the hotel "forever and ever and ever"—the same refrain Danny heard from the twins earlier.
Danny asks if Jack would ever hurt him or Wendy, and Jack appears irritated, asking if Wendy gave him that idea. He reassures Danny that he loves him and would never hurt him.
Analysis
In the course of these chapters, the film's plot moves quickly towards a climax, bringing its characters palpably closer to danger. Much of this momentum towards doom is fueled by Jack's transition from being the films protagonist to being its antagonist. At the start of the film, Jack is the first person to appear on screen, and the film seems to be his story, revolving around his new job at the hotel. However, once the family settles into the hotel, the film becomes Danny's story; not only is he consistently the first to learn about the hotel's various ghosts due to his ability to "shine," but he is also the character with whom the camera begins spending more time.
Perhaps the most visually striking representation of this shift in protagonist is Kubrick's repetition of sequences in which the camera follows Danny while he rides through the hotel on his toy bike. In these shots, the camera appears to hover just behind Danny, turning corners and changing terrain along with the boy. With each turn of the corner, one expects to see one of Danny's frightening visions come true. After withholding the jump scare until the last time Danny turns the corner, Kubrick finally shows Danny the terrifying Grady twins, this time allowing him to see the bloody scene of the girls' murder. These sequences allow us to side with Danny by literally placing us in his point of view. Just as he covers his eyes and pretends it's just "pictures in a book," so too does the viewer.
Jack, on the other hand, grows increasingly menacing in these chapters, gradually morphing into the antagonist that will terrorize Wendy and Danny for the rest of the film. This shift is powerfully communicated through the image of Jack leaning over the scale model of the hotel's hedge maze in the lobby. True, the viewer is meant to question whether the tiny figures of Wendy and Danny in the miniature maze have somehow to do with the hotel's supernatural aspects, or are merely a product of Jack's own imagination. Nevertheless, each shot of Jack towering over toy versions of his wife and child symbolizes Jack as a mounting threat to his family. However, he also resembles a child playing with his toys, thereby aligning him with Danny, who will become his enemy by the end of the film.
The idea that Jack is a potent threat to Danny is made clear by the parallel between his and the Grady twins' dialogue, as well. When Danny encounters the twins in the hotel hallway, they invite him to play with them "forever and ever." Later, a deranged-looking Jack tells Danny that he wishes they could live in the hotel "forever and ever," echoing the twins' words. This simple repetition instantly links Jack to the ghosts that Danny has envisioned as a threat since his first vision of them in Boulder—just like the twins, Jack is becoming a dangerous fixture of the hotel's dark side.
Throughout these chapters, the film continues its dependence on foreshadowing. While Wendy works in the kitchen one day, a nearby TV plays a news broadcast about a woman who went missing during a hunting trip with her husband in Aspen. By inviting the viewer to draw the obvious parallels between Wendy's situation and that of the missing woman—Wendy's worst-case-scenario fate—Kubrick builds a sense of dread around Jack's madness as a danger to his family.
