Fathers, Sons, [Holy] Ghosts

In The Shining, there's a point about half-way through when Jack's father speaks to him, telling him to kill his family:

'No!' he [Jack] screamed back. 'You're dead, you're in your grave, you're not in me at all!' Because he had cut all the father out of him and it was not right that he should come back, creeping through this hotel two thousand miles from the New England town where his father had lived and died.

Though King takes a [very disappointing] turn to relying so heavily on supernatural alone, sacrificing more psychologically engaging directions (which, arguably Kubrik reestablishes, much to the distaste of King), this point establishes the root of the evil as Oedipal.

How naive we are when we buy into the ending's serene tranquility, Danny at the dock, coming to slow terms with his father's death. This may as well be a portrait of Jack some decades earlier, coming to terms with his own family trauma. How can "Jack's" voice (whatever the being was that Danny reads it as) not carry on in Danny, just as Jack's father's voice (was it Mark?) continues on, even after it is silenced. King underlines the return of the repressed father in a number of points, indicating his vision that our worldly pursuit is none other than a retrograde motion to our traumatic past: a, as Heidegger once said, I believe, race forward toward our past. The only way for the evil to stop is, as any Oedipan will tell you, is to kill the son and halt the lineage. Maybe Grady had it right: Jack, our true protagonist, had it right the first time, and Danny--our antagonist--twisted the story around for his own selfish ego-survival, inviting a sequel. "Here's Danny!"

John Barth's sperm (Lost in the Funhouse) implores the "son"--into whom he begins to metamorphosis at the moment of conception with the giant egg before him--to stop the vicious cycle. But nobody ever listens.

N.B.: Thirty years later after The Shining King's own son, writer Joe Hill (to whom [who "shines on"] The Shining is dedicated) writes Heart Shaped Box and uncannily echoes this notion of the ghost as a paternal figure who--with a voice, but without a body--with his own agency of absence, penetrates the 'son,' effectively rendering him a passive actor in his own body. An interesting household that must have been!