What does the end of the shining mean?

Answer 1

At the end of the film, the camera zooms slowly towards an at first distant wall in the Overlook and an obscure photograph, which is revealed at the end as one including Jack Torrance taken in 1921 at the Overlook hotel. It is probably the single most frequently asked question about the film. In an interview with Michel Ciment, Kubrick overtly declared that Jack was a reincarnation of an earlier official at the hotel.[35]

However, this has not stopped interpreters from developing alternative readings.

Film critic Jonathan Romney wrote,

The closing inscription appears to explain what has happened to Jack. Until watching the film again recently I'd always assumed that, after his ordeal in the haunted palace, Jack had been absorbed into the hotel, another sacrificial victim earning his place at the Overlook's eternal dance of the damned. At the Overlook, it's always 4 July 1921 - although God knows exactly what happened that night. In fact, Jack Nicholson's likeness literally has been absorbed into the picture: collaged into a 20s archive shot and matched to the photographic grain of the original."

After his absorption theory, he quickly pointed out,

"Or you can look at it another way. Perhaps Jack hasn't been absorbed - perhaps he has really been in the Overlook all along. As the ghostly butler Grady (Philip Stone) tells him during their chilling confrontation in the men's toilet, "You're the caretaker, sir. You've always been the caretaker." Perhaps in some earlier incarnation Jack really was around in 1921, and it's his present-day self that is the shadow, the phantom photographic copy. But if his picture has been there all along, why has no one noticed it? After all, it's right at the centre of the central picture on the wall, and the Torrances have had a painfully drawn-out winter of mind-numbing leisure in which to inspect every comer of the place. Is it just that, like Poe's purloined letter, the thing in plain sight is the last thing you see? When you do see it, the effect is so unsettling because you realise the unthinkable was there under your nose - overlooked - the whole time.

Answer 2

The ending of "The Shining" is open to interpretation, but it can be seen as Jack Torrance being fully consumed by the evil forces in the Overlook Hotel and ultimately becoming a permanent resident there. It can also symbolize the cyclical nature of violence and evil, as Jack's son Danny may be destined to follow in his father's footsteps.