Narrative Theory

We applied the theories and ideas for four theorists to The Shining.

Vladimir Propp was a Russian critic who explored the underlining structure of folk tales and proposed a set of universal character and narrative functions which he thought were the basis for all stories. His ideas are an uneasy fit with The Shining because his predictions for the general narrative for horror films fit the film very loosely, The start of his theory is pretty bang on about a member of the family leaving home and a rule being broken but for there on it starts getting much harder to match his theory to the film. For example there is no deception of the victim early on in the film and the villain doesn't harm a member of family until much later on into the film. Throughout the rest of his theory there are patchy matches but the majority of predictions are far off the actual occurrences in the film. One thing Propp did get correct was his character types, and in this film particular it is easy to match his ideas to the characters in the film: The Villain - Jack/Delbert Grady. The Donor - Halloran. The Helper - Tony/Halloran. The Princess - Wendy. The Hero - Danny/Wendy. There are two character functions which don't fit so well in the film and they are the dispatcher and the false hero. Overall i think that Propps theory has some kind of sense and similarities to The Shining but the main majority of the theory is still quite far from reality.

Claude Levi-Strauss was a Belguim anthropologist born in 1908, His theory was about the Binary oppositions, for example:

Good/Evil
Past/Present
Known/Unknown
Light/Dark

This is definitely a factor in The Shining such as the past events with the previous Janitor and then the Present evens with Jack as the new one. There is good and evil aspects when the woman in the bath is a normal looking pretty woman and then she suddenly turns into a diseased wreck. Also the unknown at the end when Jack is seen on a photo which was taken from a ball at the hotel many years before, its one of those open things which leaves the audience questioning what it links too.

Tzvetan Todorov suggested that stories have a set path which are normally followed, for example the Classic Realist film has a narrative structure with an initial equilibrium, an disequilibrium and a series of events resolving this which finally leads onto a new equilibrium. In horror films the structure is very much the same because there is a path in which the villain is being defeated and then he/she comes back and gets resolved again. An example of Todorov's theory can be seen on the chart below.