Danny Torrance
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| Danny Torrance | |
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| Creator: | Stephen King |
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Daniel Anthony "Danny" Torrance is a fictional character that first appears in the 1977 novel The Shining by Stephen King as a child with "the shining", meaning psychic powers. The character also appears in the 1980 film adaptation The Shining and was played by Danny Lloyd. The character also appears in the 1997 TV miniseries The Shining and was played by Courtland Mead. In 2013, Stephen King released the novel Doctor Sleep, a sequel to the 1977 novel that features an adult Danny Torrance as the protagonist.
Danny Torrance in The Shining is one of several child characters in Stephen King's early fiction who deal with parental abandonment or the fear of it; other characters include Carrie White in Carrie and Charlene "Charlie" McGee in Firestarter. Heidi Strengell, in Dissecting Stephen King, says, "In King's view children, like Danny Torrance, are able to deal with fantasy and terror on their own terms better than adults because of the size of their imaginative capacity and their unique position in life." The reference guide Characters in 20th-Century Literature wrote, "Some critics complain that Danny displays an improbable maturity for a child his age." Author Dale Bailey, writing about haunted houses, said King's writing of Danny, a psychic in a haunted setting, borrowed the link made by Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson in their works. Bailey perceives Danny as having ambivalence toward his father, being devoted but also learning psychically how emotionally disturbed his father is. The author said there was evidence of parallels between Danny and his father, "Danny, like Jack himself, may someday fall into behavioral patterns of the father he both loves and fears."
In the novel The Shining, Danny shares his power of "the shining" with several strangers, where in the film adaptation, he is secretive about it, even when sharing with Dick Halloran. In the novel, Danny has an extraordinary intelligence, a large vocabulary, is attached to his father and is able to foresee all of Hotel Overlook's horrors. In contrast, in the film, he is portrayed as an ordinary boy with only the extraordinary power and has visions that change with events that happen at the hotel. Academic Greg Jenkins says the primary reason for Danny being less talkative was the difficulty for a child actor to memorize lines, but he said the minimal dialogue also created more suspense.
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