Yet that is what we have here. King doesn’t let Roland dwell too much on the metaphysical nature of his quest, but it’s there just the same.
And Roland is effective. It is only logical to extrapolate from the dialogue between Roland and Walter at the end of The Gunslinger that a powerful entity has recognized in Roland the potential to do precisely what he plans. Interestingly enough, however, the force does not appear determined to stop him. And why should it? Nothing can interfere with ka, the word, in Roland’s world, for destiny.
There is more to Roland than even he knows.
As the narrative evolves, Roland must struggle with the focus and callousness he was taught as a gunslinger, as well as his great capacity for love, a part of him that he regularly denies. Still, he places his quest above all else, even at the cost of the life of the boy, Jake Chambers.
But Roland is a product of his world, a place that had already “moved on” (begun to deteriorate, suffering greatly from natural—or perhaps forced—entropy) when he was a boy, but now has broken down even further. It seems that all that is good and noble has gone out of the world. Just as another modern version of the romantic epic hero, Luke Skywalker of Star Wars, is the last of the Jedi Knights, so is Roland the last of the gunslingers, until, like Skywalker, he himself searches out, discovers, and begins to train more.
King’s boyhood home, Durham DAVID LOWELL
But while George Lucas’s creations take the stage a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, King’s characters feel much closer to home. There are startling similarities between Roland’s world and what we’ll call the Prime Reality, in which novels such as The Shining (1977) and ’Salem’s Lot (1975) take place. Some time in the past—as evidenced by old songs and artifacts and the words of Walter—Roland’s world was almost identical to the Prime Reality of the Stephen King Universe, the one that includes Castle Rock and Derry.
PRIMARY SUBJECTS
ROLAND: A member of the warrior caste called gunslingers, Roland is the son of Gabrielle and Steven, the rulers of Gilead, the Barony where Roland grew up. Gilead was the shining star in the Affiliation, a group of baronies that made up the core of Mid-World civilization. Thanks to the machinations of the sorcerer Marten (a.k.a. Walter, a.k.a. the man in black), the Affiliation was shattered and civilization crumbled. The world moved on, suffering the predations and deterioration of entropy. The gunslingers died off or were killed. Roland is the last of them.
Roland’s quest, at first, is twofold: first, to find the man in black and have vengeance upon him for his evil doings, and second, to journey to the Dark Tower, and there find the answers to the questions of the universe, including the very nature of reality itself. His quest to find the Tower is not merely for curiosity’s sake, however. He believes it to be his destiny—his ka—and also believes that the universe is unraveling because of some malevolent force gnawing at the Tower and at the Beams that bind all of reality together, and that this must be stopped.
During this journey, Roland meets Jake Chambers for the first time. Jake is one key to the evolution Roland must undergo on his journey, but when he is faced with the choice of letting the boy die or losing the trail of the man in black, he chooses to pursue his quarry, and Jake dies. For now.
Later, Roland spends ten years entranced by the man in black on a mountaintop, after Walter has told his fortune. Roland’s quest, though he has already been at it for a very long time, is merely beginning.
WALTER/MARTEN/FLAGG: Also known as Walter O’Dim and the man in black. Though we are not yet aware of it, Walter is merely one face for a being we refer to (as King has referred to him) as Legion. He is also Marten Broadcloak and Randall Flagg, among others.
Walter is a powerful sorcerer who manipulates and topples rulers, spreads his influence, and perpetuates evil in the service of a Master we are not yet familiar with. Walter manipulates Roland’s life and leads him on a chase across the desert and to the mountains, where he reads Roland’s fortune and gives him a psychic vision revealing the true nature of the secrets within the Tower, before apparently dying himself, having served his purpose.
As Marten, he was a sorcerer and enchanter who manipulated Roland’s father, Steven, and seduced the man’s wife, a series of events that led to the ruin of Gilead. As Flagg, he has performed many heinous deeds throughout the multiverse.
THE CRIMSON KING: Though we see very little of the Crimson King at the outset of Roland’s tale, it is implied that he is the gunslinger’s true enemy, and all others merely his servants.
JAKE CHAMBERS: Jake is not from Roland’s reality, but rather, some other dimension. After he is murdered by being pushed in front of a car in his own reality, he is somehow transported to Roland’s world, where he briefly joins Roland on his quest. When Roland is forced to choose between catching the man in black or letting Jake fall to his death, however, Roland lets the boy die.
Jake will return, though, for he has a continuing role to play in the journey of the gunslinger.
STEVEN DESCHAIN: Father to Roland, husband to Gabrielle, lord of Gilead, he is betrayed by his wife and his confidant, Marten. It costs him his life.
CORT: Cort is the instructor who teaches the boys of Gilead everything they need to know to become gunslingers. He teaches them how to use their weapons, as well as hand-to-hand combat and strategy. In order to “graduate,” a gunslinger must defeat Cort in brutal single combat. If the young man cannot defeat his teacher, he is banished from Gilead. Roland becomes the youngest gunslinger ever to defeat his teacher.
CUTHBERT: During their youth, Cuthbert was Roland’s best friend. In time, he became a gunslinger. Cuthbert was part of Roland’s original ka-tet and would one day become a casualty of his quest for the Tower.
DAVID: In order to defeat Cort and take his place among the ranks of gunslingers, Roland must choose a single weapon. He selects his falcon, David.
GABRIELLE: Roland’s mother, Gabrielle, is wife to the ruler of Gilead.
She betrays her husband by sleeping with Marten, the enchanter. She is later accidentally killed by her own son.
HAX: A cook in the service of Roland’s father, he turns out to be a traitor, and is hanged by the Gilead authorities. Roland attends the execution.
SUSAN: The one girl Roland ever loved, Susan was a part of his life many years ago. She was burned to death in Mejis, a tragedy of which we shall learn more in subsequent volumes.
THE TOWER: The Tower is the axis upon which all time and space, all of reality, spins, and from which the Beams that bind reality together, just like spokes from a wheel, emanate. It is Order placed upon the necessary and infinite Chaos of the multiverse. Within the physical existence of the Tower lies all the knowledge, magickal and otherwise, in existence. Roland is determined to find it.
THE DARK TOWER: THE GUNSLINGER: TRIVIA
• The Gunslinger was originally published in a limited hardcover edition of ten thousand copies. Perhaps because King deemed it so very different from his other work, years passed before it became available to the general public in any other edition.
• The revised edition of The Gunslinger was published in 2003. In addition to adding length and texture to the original, King altered and clarified certain story elements, providing fresh hints regarding the overall mythology of the series.
2
THE DARK TOWER II: THE DRAWING OF THE THREE
(1987)
In the first volume of the Dark Tower series, 1982’s The Gunslinger, Stephen King introduced his loyal readership to Roland of Gilead. At the time of its release, initially only a limited edition, the first book was an oddity, a fantasy novel with a western motif by the acknowledged master of horror. Even five years later, when this second volume was released, also only in a limited edition, readers were unaware that King had embarked upon the greatest literary journey of his career.
In the comparatively brief first volume, The Gunslinger, we are introduced to Roland as he travels across the desert in pursui
t of “the man in black,” who turns out to be a wizard named Walter. Walter had a part in the destruction of the entire civilization Roland had known throughout his life, including the society and nobility of the barony of Gilead, of which Roland’s father was lord. The gunslinger set out after that destruction on a quest to find the Dark Tower, which others insist is only a myth but that Roland believes is not only real, but holds the secrets of the universe. At the Tower he believes he will find an explanation for the manner in which his world has fallen apart or “moved on,” as he so often thinks of it.
Believing that Walter can offer information about the Tower, and in an effort to have revenge upon the wizard, he tracks the man in black and finally confronts him. Walter did provide certain information about the Tower, though all of it vague, and told Roland’s fortune, again vaguely, before dying. At the end of that premiere installment, Roland was still on his quest.
King’s West Broadway mansion in Bangor VINTAGE POSTCARD
The Drawing of the Three was first released in 1987 in a limited edition from Donald M. Grant, Publisher—which has published the hardcover editions of each of the books in the series—and in 1989 in a trade paperback version from Plume Books. While The Gunslinger introduced us to Roland, his quest, and the basic concepts of his world, this second volume does not really advance him along his journey very much. Rather, it spends its time doing precisely what the title implies, drawing together his team, in the same way that bands of adventurers have gathered around heroes throughout myth and popular fiction. They are Robin Hood’s Merry Men. They are the apostles. They are the X-Men.
They are ka-tet.
For that is what The Drawing of the Three is really about, though we, as readers, don’t quite understand it early on. In Roland’s world, ka-tet means a great many things, one of which is family. It can be a group of people—usually without actual blood relationships—bound together by duty, obligation, love, and common objectives. But in many ways, it is even more vital and real than family, because there are other definitions of ka-tet. More than those aforementioned values, it is a group of people bound together by destiny. Fate has inextricably linked them together, for better or worse. This may define an alliance, or it may explain the hatred of sworn enemies—they are destined to oppose one another until one falls.
In this case, however, we are speaking of the former.
Over the course of this volume, Roland travels from his reality (or dimension) into others through mystical portals that appear inexplicably on the beach, placed there by some unknowable universal force (referred to later in the series as “the White”) that is attempting to help him. By way of these portals, he enters the minds of individuals in other worlds, and can assert control over them physically. He is even able to bring things back from those worlds. Things … and people.
He visits three variant realities in this fashion—or, quite possibly, simply three different time periods of the same reality. During these trips, Roland abruptly abducts two people who will in time become part of the new order of gunslingers, part of his new ka-tet.
Eddie Dean comes from a New York City in 1987. Odetta Holmes, a legless woman with multiple personality syndrome, comes from a New York in 1963. The third person drawn, as per the title, is apparently Susannah, Odetta’s other personality.
Roland visits a third reality, however. There he jumps into the mind of a murderer named Jack Mort—which of course means “death”—mentally inhabiting his body just as he did Eddie’s and Odetta’s before drawing them through. Mort thinks of himself as “the pusher.” But it isn’t drugs he pushes, it’s people.
In fact—and here is the kind of thing that in the world of The Dark Tower cannot be coincidence—Mort is responsible for the injury that caused Odetta’s multiple personalities to develop, as well as a second incident that led to the loss of her legs. Further, Mort is responsible for the death of Jake Chambers.
As detailed in the entry for The Gunslinger, Jake is a young boy from a parallel reality Earth (which we later discover is the same reality from which Eddie Dean hails) who was pushed in front of a car and died in his reality … only to somehow awaken in Roland’s. Impossible to explain, and yet true. For a time in the first volume he was Roland’s traveling companion, but at a crucial moment the gunslinger was forced to decide whether to save Jake’s life or finally catch up with the man in black. He let Jake die.
It is a deed over which he agonizes, the guilt eating at him. Here in the second volume, Roland has a chance to undo that wrong. This redemptive action will set up a maddening incongruity between the two dimensions that Roland must deal with in volume three.
There is already an implication here that Jake will become a member of the newly developed ka-tet; indeed, he will. Already it seems that the members of this ka-tet are intrinsically linked to one another.
Through Roland’s intervention, Odetta is able to unify her two disparate personalities, merging to become one woman, named Susannah Dean, as she now considers herself Eddie’s wife: another link in the chain that binds them together.
Though Roland’s quest seems to grind to a halt during the events of this story, Roland himself continues to grow as an individual. He is a cold, practical, single-minded man, and yet the presence of Eddie and Susannah forming a new ka-tet begins, even here, to bring about a change in Roland. He does not become softer—that would be the death of him. He does, however, become more aware of what is happening around him, and of the feelings of those with whom he is now forever linked.
Still, it is clear that his quest for the Tower supersedes any such humane concerns. As we are told time and again, nothing is too precious to be sacrificed in favor of the quest.
We have posited that the quest does not truly advance in this story. This is not entirely true. Roland begins this story on the beach, and he spends most of the book there, walking along the shore in a direction his instincts tell him is the right one. At intervals along the way, he comes upon the doors through which the three are drawn. Even thereafter, they continue on their way.
But although they cross many miles of ground, that in itself does not feel like progress. The progress in this tale is almost entirely internal. External, yes, in that Roland builds his ka-tet with Eddie and Susannah, but internal in that the only real progress is in the preparation to reach the Tower. The team is molded, the bonds are formed, almost as though these were necessary rituals.
What all of this accomplishes, in a more concrete way, is the formulation of identity for all three characters. Roland, the last gunslinger, seeks to redefine himself in a world that has moved on, and has no more use for his kind. He seeks to find the truth about his virtue, the answer to his own questions about what kind of man he really is, in the aftermath of Jake’s death in the first volume.
Eddie, for his part, strives to find the identity at his core, beneath the despicable surface of the drug-addicted loser dependent on an enabling relationship with his brother. He strives to find within him the man he knew that he could be, and he does.
Odetta/Susannah’s quest for identity is, of course, the most obvious of the three. Her split personalities—the erudite, wealthy Odetta Holmes and the vulgar, furious and uneducated Detta Walker—are both aspects of her self, but she is not a whole being until those aspects are united in Susannah Dean.
Their identity quests are individual, but could not be realized without one another. This is yet another facet of ka-tet. Separately, their paths were unclear, their wills—with the exception of Roland’s—wavering. But together they become strong, the whole feeding strength and purpose back into the parts, the individuals.
Finally, as to the Tower itself, and the nature of the Stephen King Universe as a whole, within The Drawing of the Three, we actually learn very little of those things. Which is, perhaps, to be expected in what is only the second volume of a much longer story.
THE DRAWING OF THE THREE: PRIMARY SUBJECTS
ROLAND: The last survivor of an orde
r of warriors called gunslingers, Roland is the son of the lord and lady who ruled the Barony of Gilead. Gilead and all the Baronies of the Affiliation lie in ruins. The destruction of Gilead and the circumstances surrounding the deaths of many of his family and friends are unclear at this point. Roland is on his own, and must begin again by gathering a new breed of gunslingers, gunslingers that he himself must train.
As he travels along the beach, he encounters doors into other dimensions, from which he brings back both Eddie Dean and the woman who will become known as Susannah Dean. They are to be the new gunslingers, and members of Roland’s ka-tet, who join him on the quest for the Dark Tower that consumes his every thought.
The quest is his fate and his destiny. It is the only reason he draws breath. Roland continues on his quest with his new companions, and the Tower draws ever closer.
The Complete Stephen King Universe Page 3
