Socioeconomic Class
In The Shining, socioeconomic class is presented as an underlying motive for Jack's descent into madness. Firmly situated in the working class, Jack begins the film unemployed, and we meet him at a job interview. Although he associates the hotel with luxury, he is somewhat defined by his role as its "caretaker," a menial position. Even so, he asserts that his real profession is writing, suggesting an ambition to climb the social ladder and gain prestige. Throughout the film, Jack treats his wife, Wendy, as a force threatening to disrupt the success and fortune he seeks. For example, when Mr. Ullman gives Jack and Wendy a tour of the hotel, Wendy remarks that she's never seen a hotel as grand as the Overlook, making her and Jack appear somewhat provincial compared to the "jet set" that, according to Ullman, frequent the hotel.
Later in the film, Jack accuses Wendy of limiting his potential and promises not to let her ruin his job at the Overlook. He also specifically mentions that if they returned to Boulder prematurely he would be reduced to working at menial jobs. As Jack gradually goes mad, his delusions are represented as fantasies of grandeur and luxury. This is particularly in play during Jack's visits to the hotel's Gold Room, where he drinks on the house and fits in with the guests in formal attire even though he wears a casual jacket. Lloyd treats Jack like the man he aspires to be, as does Delbert Grady, who in contrast refers to Dick Hallorann as the "n***er cook," as if to perpetuate the social hierarchies of the hotel. Ironically Jack cannot fulfill the potential he envisions for himself and types the same sentence repeatedly instead of the book he wishes to write.
Madness versus Possession
One of the central ambiguities of The Shining is whether Jack goes mad or is possessed by the evils of the hotel. Wendy tells the doctor who comes to see Danny after his first vision about Jack's history of alcoholism and accidental violence towards Danny. Later, we see that Jack's resentment of Wendy for failing to forgive him for such mistakes, and for holding him back from his destiny as a successful writer, were present long before the family's move to the haunted Overlook Hotel. However, the hotel's ability to "shine," as Dick Hallorann puts it, also seems to push Jack over the edge, suggesting that he is not going mad but rather is possessed by the traumatized spirits of the hotel's past. This conclusion is supported by the increasingly real presence of the hotel's ghosts, beginning with Jack's first encounter with Lloyd, the Gold Room bartender of yore, and culminating in Wendy's romp through the hotel at the end of the film, wherein she finally sees what Jack and Danny have seen throughout the film: the hotel's partying skeletons, the Grady twins, and the bloody elevator.
This conflict calls into question the role of fatalism versus free will in the film, as Jack seems both destined to be driven mad by the hotel and predisposed to go mad of his own troubled volition. This tension is likewise present in Danny, whose possession by Tony, "the boy who lives in [his] mouth," initially seems benign, but who later loses control to Tony when danger is at its height.
The Past
History and nostalgia figure heavily in the haunting that plagues Jack in The Shining. Throughout the film, Jack and Wendy Torrance refer to a troubled past to which we are given little access, but which revolves around Jack's violence against Danny. The Overlook Hotel has a similar relationship to its troubled past (the Grady murder-suicide), which Mr. Ullman explains to Jack during the his job interview.
This theme is discussed directly when Dick Hallorann confronts Danny about their shared ability to "shine." When Danny asks Dick if something bad happened at the hotel, Dick tells Danny that some events in the past leave marks on a place like when "someone burns toast." This works as an extended metaphor throughout the film as the hotel's past infects Jack's psyche. This occurs in proportion to Jack's fascination with the hotel's "good old days," when the Gold Room's stylish parties gave the hotel its luxurious reputation. This fascination becomes fantasy when Jack visits Lloyd at the bar and witnesses an exuberant ball being thrown in the Gold Room.
Jack's aspiration to become a famous writer likewise plays into this nostalgia for an earlier golden age, his routine of sequestering himself to write and then drinking heavily fitting into an Ernest Hemingway-like fantasy of the great American novel writer. Kubrick pokes holes in such a fantasy throughout the film, however. For example, the racism present in Delbert Grady's mention of "the n***er cook" (referring to Dick Hallorann) demonstrates that the "good old days" weren't good for everyone. This idea is likewise present in Wendy's increasing desperation as she tries to hold her nuclear family together.
Writing
Throughout the film, writing serves as an expression of Jack's—and by extension, the hotel's—descent into madness. His major ambition during his time at the Overlook is finally to get the peace and quiet to write, but the project goes haywire, and the final production is nothing but a repetition of "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." This repetition becomes further associated with visions and madness when Danny sees (and then writes) the word REDRUM on the door of their hotel bathroom. REDRUM, of course, is MURDER spelled backwards, another foray into repetition and wordplay on the part of the film. Even the last shot of the film, depicting the picture of a bygone party (with Jack in attendance) thrown at the hotel, uses text as a means of complicating reality by tilting down to reveal the date on the picture: July 4th Ball, 1921. In this way, the film uses writing to call the reliability of the seen world into question.
Family
The breakdown of the nuclear family unit is a theme that underlies much of The Shining's conflict. From a distance, the Torrance family is the picture of a classic American family. Upon closer examination, however, the Torrances' family life is rife with resentment and fear, revolving principally around Jack's insecurity about his future as a writer and his authority as a provider. Despite Wendy's ambition to keep her family together, the resentment that Jack harbors towards her and Danny gradually emerges as a threat to their very lives.
This conflict is symbolically embodied by the hotel's hedge maze. In one scene, Wendy and Danny explore the hedge maze while Jack, one half benevolent father and one half bully, towers over its scale model in the hotel lobby, watching tiny versions of his wife and child walk further into the maze, hinting at their impending separation. In the final sequence of the film, this same maze, once surveilled by domineering Jack, entraps and distances him from his family forever.
The decay of the all-American family is likewise present in the fractured nature of the hotel's geography. This is embodied in the visions that Danny and Jack have of the hotel's various ghosts, as the various members of the Grady family never appear together, but rather in disparate pockets of the hotel. Room 237, for example, is particularly fearsome for Jack because it contains both the fantasy and nightmare that he associates with the archetypal mother figure. There, he watches his sexy dream woman decay into the grotesque old woman with whom he fears growing old. Importantly, Wendy never meets this woman during her time at the hotel.
Isolation
From the very start, The Shining draws attention to the isolation of the Overlook Hotel and the harmful effects it can have upon human relationships. The film begins on careening shots of the windy mountain roads that lead up to the Overlook, dramatizing its extreme isolation from the modern, urban world. The threat of "cabin fever" is mentioned explicitly when Mr. Ullman warns Jack that the job for which he is interviewing is "mentally isolating," a quality that precipitated the 1970 Grady murders. Jack, of course, counters that he longs for such isolation, as it will lend him the time and space he needs to write. This exchange provides the foundation for the essential conflict of the film: whether Jack will use this seclusion to provide for his family or let it infect his brain and prompt him to kill his family. That he will follow the latter path is foreshadowed when Wendy brings up the Donner Party during the family's drive to the hotel.
The hotel's hedge maze, as well as the fragmented nature of the hotel itself, play a symbolic role in this sense of isolation, as it represents a literal danger of getting lost and losing connection with the outside world. Ultimately, the maze emerges as the only real threat to Jack's madness when he freezes to death while searching for Danny in the maze's center.
Order versus Chaos
Thanks to Stanley Kubrick's intensive approach to set design, the Overlook Hotel is dominated by patterns that symbolize order and sanity. Perhaps the most iconic of these is the hotel's hedge maze, the ultimate symbol of an intricate, controlled logic. Notably, Jack is unable to find his way out of this highly ordered environment at the close of the film, too insane to make sense of its ordered twists and turns, whereas Danny, still rooted in sanity, easily extricates himself and escapes into the arms of his mother.
Another important pattern is that of the carpet in the hallway where Danny plays with his toy cars. This intensely geometric carpet is interrupted by the appearance of the pink tennis ball, which the Grady twins roll to Danny when they invite him to play, thereby disrupting the order and integrity of a child's playtime. This relates to the larger fragmentation of the hotel itself, to which Wendy draws attention when she jokes to Dick Hallorann that she may need breadcrumbs to find her way out of the mammoth kitchen. Wendy is forced to come to grips with the hotel's confusing geography when she runs through the hotel at the film's close, disoriented by the winding staircases and hallways peopled with ghosts.
This friction between order and chaos is also present in the Native American murals that adorn the Overlook's walls. Jack disrupts the geometry of these murals when he throws a tennis ball against them, perhaps upsetting the spirits of the buried Native Americans that Mr. Ullman mentions early in the film and unleashing their supernatural revenge.
