FROM VULNERABILITY TO ETHICAL AGENCY: DANNY TORRANCE, THE SHINING AND THE RESISTANCE TO PREDATORY EVIL IN STEPHEN KING’S DOCTOR SLEEP

Abstract

This paper explores the character of Danny Torrance in Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep (2013) as one that focuses, metaphorically speaking, on the human ability to fight evil without perpetuating it. The argument turns on a distinction the novel develops with unusual rigour: between supernatural capacity and ethical agency. It is not Danny’s ability to shine that makes him important, as the novel’s villains have their own version of the power or something even more potent and use it to harvest children for food. He is unique in that he has gone through a series of transformations: traumatic memory to containment technique, shame to accountability, perceptual gift to protective obligation and personal survival to the mentorship of another gifted child. The first part is a terminological confusion that is clarified by stating that Doctor Sleep is a supernatural horror and in Todorov’s terms, a marvellous and not magical realism as per Chanady, Faris and Spindler’s definition, as the supernatural never becomes naturalised and never stops terrifying. The following sections explore Danny’s alcoholism and the novel’s rejection of heroism, the turnaround represented by Abra Stone, the True Knot as a concept of evil based on the devouring of extraordinary potential and the comparative ethics of power in four characters. As in the reading offered here, hope is not the triumph over evil but a refusal of predation on the part of the survivor.