Summary
Just after Jack's encounter with the woman in Room 237, Dick Hallorann attempts to call the Overlook Hotel but cannot get through.
Back in her room, Wendy is crying hysterically when a knock sounds at the door. It's Jack, and he lies to Wendy that he didn't see anything in the room. Jack suggests that Danny gave himself the bruises and links it to the episode he had in their apartment in Boulder before they moved to the hotel.
Meanwhile, Danny lies in his bed wide awake and notices the word "REDRUM" scrawled in red on his door. He then has a vision of the same bloody elevator that he saw at home in Boulder.
Wendy suggests she and Jack leave so that Danny can see a doctor. Jack is irate at her suggestion, as he believes he is finally succeeding at a job. If they returned to Boulder, he argues, he would be forced to work at menial jobs, which he refuses to do. He storms off, promising her that he won't let her mess up his life anymore.
Jack storms into the kitchen, followed by the lobby, where he stops short. The entire lobby is covered in balloons and streamers, the remnants of a large party. He hears music coming from the Gold Room.
Dick Hallorann calls the nearby park ranger office and asks if they could radio the hotel to check on the family staying there.
Jack follows the music and finds the Gold Room crowded with people in formalwear. There is ballroom dancing and raucous drinking everywhere. Jack walks to the bar and greets Lloyd, who won't accept payment for Jack's drink on "orders from the house." Jack hesitates, saying that he's "the kind of man who wants to know who's buying his drinks." Lloyd says it doesn't concern Jack at this point.
Jack rises just as a waiter passes and spills liquor on his jacket. The waiter begs Jack to follow him to the bathroom so he can clean Jack up. The men retreat to a bathroom painted entirely red.
The waiter introduces himself as Delbert Grady, and Jack recognizes the last name from his job interview with Mr. Ullman. He asks the man if he used to be the caretaker of the hotel, to which Grady replies no. Jack insists that he saw his name in the newspapers, detailing the crime as Mr. Ullman had explained it to him. Grady has no memory of the incident and insists that Jack is the caretaker. "You've always been the caretaker. I should know. I've always been here," Grady says.
The men stare at each other intensely until Grady asks Jack if he's aware that Danny is attempting to introduce "an outside party" to the situation at the hotel, referring to Dick Hallorann. Grady goes on to explain that Danny has a "very great talent" and wishes to use it against Jack. Jack agrees that Danny is a "very willful boy." Grady adds that he is not only willful, but naughty.
Jack blames Danny's mother for his disobedience, and Grady suggests they need "a good talking to," or perhaps "a bit more." Grady explains that his daughters didn't like the hotel when they first moved there, and that one of them even tried to burn it down, but that he "corrected them."
Meanwhile, Wendy talks to herself, reasoning that she can escape from the hotel with Danny in the Snowcat and radio the park rangers in case they get stuck on the way. Suddenly, she hears someone yelling in Danny's room and finds it is Danny yelling "REDRUM." She tries to calm him down, but Danny merely answers, in Tony's voice, "Danny's not here, Mrs. Torrance." She embraces him, crying hysterically.
Jack stalks through the lobby and hears someone calling the hotel on the radio. He enters Mr. Ullman's office and removes three of the radio's mechanical parts. Soon after, Dick Hallorann calls the ranger's office and learns that their attempts to contact the family were unsuccessful.
Analysis
The second half of this chapter opens with the dramatic irony of Jack's lie about what he saw in Room 237. Because we know that Room 237 is haunted, whereas Jack leads Wendy to believe that Danny lied about the crazy woman that occupies it, the viewer understands that Room 237 is at the center of the gradual disintegration of the Torrance family, a theme that dominates the second half of the film.
This chapter also marks the escalation of red as a prominent motif of the film, beginning with Danny's vision of the word "REDRUM" scrawled on the Torrance's bathroom door. "REDRUM," of course, is an anagram of "MURDER," and thus a foreshadowing of Jack's later attempts to kill his wife and son. It also echoes Danny's repeated visions of red blood rushing from the hotel elevator, symbolizing the carnage, past and present, that pervades the hotel.
What truly prompts the viewer to recall Danny's vision, however, is the setting of Jack's subsequent talk with Delbert Grady: a room painted entirely red. Given the surreal nature of the discussion that takes place between Jack and Grady, this setting could function as sheer illusion, breaking as it does with the design scheme present in the rest of the hotel. Regardless, this room is the site of Jack's final decision to kill Wendy and Danny, making the penetrating, hellish color of the room in this scene a symbol of Jack's madness.
Also present in this chapter is the motif of the double, which plays into the film's treatment of identity and madness. This motif appears early in the film in the form of the Grady twins, who dominate Danny's visions even before the family moves to the hotel. But it is Delbert Grady in particular who feeds into this motif, as he varies in numerous ways from the Grady that Mr. Ullman told Jack about. Of course, the first difference is that his name is Delbert, whereas the Grady that murdered his family was supposedly named Charles. More importantly, however, Delbert Grady denies having been the caretaker of the hotel or having murdered his family. Later, he admits to having done so using euphemisms ("I corrected them," he says).
The film also builds on existing themes of socioeconomic class in this chapter, particularly when Jack fantasizes about a grandiose party in the Gold Room. It is especially significant that this sequence follows a fight between Jack and Wendy in which Jack accuses Wendy of holding him back from success by ruining his chances of moving on from menial jobs. In sharp contrast to this, Jack is treated like an important man in the Gold Room, where Lloyd informs him that he drinks on the house, a special guest at the already lavish ball going on. When Delbert Grady, a waiter, spills Advocaat on Jack's jacket—a casual bomber jacket that Grady treats as if it is a fancy suit jacket—it becomes especially evident that this is one of Jack's delusions of grandeur, a product of his insecurity about his role as a menial worker.
