by Vincent, Bev
33 Parkus says the Crimson King is “Tower-pent,” echoing the term “prison-pent” from Look Homeward, Angel, the Thomas Wolfe book that also contains the phrase “a stone, a leaf, an unfound door.”
34 Parkus says, “On the upper levels of the Tower, there are those who call the last two hundred or so years in your world the Age of Poisoned Thought.” This is roughly the length of time the Wolves have been raiding the Callas.
35 Munshun is “as bald as Yul Brynner,” star of The Magnificent Seven, part of King’s inspiration for Wolves of the Calla.
Chapter 10
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Roland Deschain of Gilead
You started as a version of Sergio Leone’s Man With No Name. You were okay. A lot of fun to partner up with. But then you changed. Right under my hand. It got so I didn’t know if you were the hero, the antihero, or no hero at all.
[DT6]
Roland Deschain, son of Stephen and grandson of Alaric and Henry the Tall, is a descendant of Arthur Eld, the ancestor of all gunslingers, and his wife, Queen Rowena. Alaric went to the now-legendary southern realm of Garlan to slay a dragon, but another king, one who was later murdered, had already killed the last one in that part of the world. This was probably King Roland the Good of Delain.
Arthur Eld was the first king to rise after the Prim receded, and Guardian of the Dark Tower, King of All-World. Steven Deschain, Roland’s father, was of the twenty-ninth generation, on the sideline of descent. Roland is the only remaining gunslinger, the last of the line of Eld, the only hope that the world’s rueful shuffle toward ruin might still be reversed. Though he graciously extends his lineage to include the members of his new ka-tet, the others know that, at best, they are only a distant shoot, far from the trunk.
He could pass for Stephen King’s father when King is thirty, so he must look at least fifty. However, he’s ageless. His homeland of Gilead, barony seat of New Canaan, one small mote of land located in the western regions of Mid-World, and center of the Affiliation, has been in ruins for a millennium since a civil war. Roland tells the ka-tet, “I’ve quested after the Dark Tower for over a thousand years, sometimes skipping over whole generations.” Joe Collins says Roland must be older than God. “Some would say so,” he responds.
Though King believes all his characters are partly him and partly what he sees in other people, Roland is the one that is most unlike him.1 King said he doesn’t have a clear picture of what any of his characters look like because he is behind their eyes looking out. He commented, though, that Michael Whelan’s version of Roland from The Gunslinger illustrations is what he sees in his mind’s eye when he writes.2
Roland’s tarot card is the Hanged Man, which by itself symbolizes strength.
He has cold and steady blue eyes, the color of fading Levi’s. His black hair is streaked with white by the time he reaches Calla Bryn Sturgis. His face is tanned, lined and weathered. A grizzled but vital star like Paul Newman or Clint Eastwood would play him in a movie, with the dark, mysterious demeanor of Yul Brynner. Jake sees the similarity with Eastwood, but mostly in his eyes. Susannah thinks of him as an existential version of Marshal Dillon from Gunsmoke. Not as broad shouldered or as tall as Dillon—though he is considered tall for someone from Gilead—and his face seems to her more that of a tired poet than a Wild West lawman.
His entire youth was spent training to be a gunslinger. He excels at drawing a gun but isn’t the smartest in his class. Because he’s so close-mouthed, Abel Vannay, his classroom teacher, calls Roland “Gabby,” a nickname that brings his mother, Gabriel, to mind. “[W]hen he decided to play his cards close to the vest, he played them very close indeed.”
His fighting tutor and mentor, Cort, teased him for lacking imagination, something he’s told so often he believes it. “I could always haul a gun faster than any of my mates, and shoot straighter, but I’ve never been much good at thinking around corners.” He’s not flashingly intelligent like Cuthbert, or even quick like Jamie. The man in black tells him, “Your slow, plodding, tenacious mind. There has never been one quite like it, in all the history of the world. Perhaps in the history of creation.” [DT1] His friend Cuthbert says the wheels in Roland’s head grind slow but exceedingly fine.
He is one of only thirteen who completed the rigorous process from a beginning class—the last class—of fifty-six, and the youngest ever to succeed at the trial of manhood. Marten the wizard and traitor, who spied against Roland’s father and seduced his mother, underestimates Roland’s talents. He goads the boy into challenging Cort at the age of fourteen, intending him to fail and be sent west, where he wouldn’t be a threat.
Instead, Roland rises to the challenge. His choice of weapon is ingenious and an early indication of the lengths to which he will go to succeed. He sacrifices his aging friend, David the hawk, in the name of victory. Officially a gunslinger, he is still no match for Marten, and his father sends him out of harm’s way with Cuthbert and Alain.
On the morning Roland is sent away, his father looks somberly “at his only son. The one who had lived.” [DT4] This enigmatic reference has led to speculation that Roland has a sibling, perhaps one who died in childbirth. In fact, he has two siblings, a brother and a sister.3 Since both Roland and the Crimson King are descendants of Arthur Eld, according to Walter, some people have wondered if Roland’s nemesis is an evil twin. They share a lifelong obsession with the Dark Tower. The Crimson King, though, according to various reports, has been busy trying to destroy the Tower for thousands of years, apparently longer than even Roland has been alive.
In Mejis, Roland falls in love with Susan Delgado, a beautiful woman two years his senior who is promised to Mayor Thorin. He also displays his independence and disregard for his friends and companions when he refuses to share his plans with them. He will always keep secrets from those who would help him, and convince himself it is the right thing to do. Even when he has companions, he operates like he’s alone and only his objectives matter.
At the end of that long summer, Roland surrenders Susan in the name of his newfound quest for the Tower, revealed to him by the pink Wizard’s Glass, but is traumatized when the townspeople kill her. She was pregnant with the next in the line of Eld. Shortly after he returns to Gilead, he accidentally kills his deceitful mother, tricked by Rhea of Cöos.
Roland joins the futile fight to save Gilead, but only out of duty. The Dark Tower has become his ambition. Farson’s forces corner the last surviving gunslingers—including Cuthbert, Jamie and Alain—at Jericho Hill, five hundred miles north of Mejis. According to Flagg’s recollection of the battle, Roland escaped by hiding in a cart filled with dead men. At Jericho Hill, Roland leaves behind a horn that once belonged to Arthur Eld, something he will need when he reaches the Tower. He’s so focused on the long-term goal that he overlooks this one small detail.
He casts about alone for many years, centuries perhaps, trying to find the man in black, who is the key to reaching the Dark Tower. In Eluria, Roland isn’t yet cold-blooded enough to shoot the club-wielding Slow Mutants who threaten him. By the time he reaches Tull, he is destroying everyone in the town. As a seasoned gunslinger, he always feels sick after the big battles. What he doesn’t say, though, is that he is never so happy to be alive as when he’s preparing to deal death.
His most prized possessions are the items that define his nature—the heavy revolvers with sandalwood stocks and barrels made from Arthur Eld’s great sword Excalibur, handed down from father to son for generations along with another inheritance: fantastic pride. He owns little else of value, “other than the ruins of my younger face.” His gunna consists of ammunition, tobacco and a leather grow-bag, a continually replenishing source of money or gems.
Roland survives because his dark, dryly romantic nature is overset by his practicality and simplicity. He’s the sort of man who would straighten pictures in strange hotel rooms; he guards the secret of his romanticism jealously. He understands that only three things matter: mor
tality, ka and the Tower. He doesn’t care to understand himself deeply; he doesn’t discuss philosophy or study history. Things in the past are beyond his power to change, and ka will take care of what’s ahead.
Susannah believes Roland underestimates his thinking abilities and imagination. His intuitive understanding of Odetta’s disorder and his solution to her split personality is only one example of how creative he really is. He has little use for artful cleverness, but when he fully takes on the mantle of gunslinger he is brilliant. She once thought he was unsubtle, but revises that estimation when he acts as emissary in the Calla. “The fact that he’s probably going to get me killed—get all of us killed—doesn’t change the fact: He is my hero. The last hero.”
He’s a Dark Tower junkie addicted to rules and tradition, with little regard for anyone who gets in his way. “Morals may always be beyond you,” Roland’s father tells him at the age of eleven. “It will make you formidable.” He lies when it suits his purpose. “I am like one of the old people’s death-machines. One that will either accomplish the task for which it has been made or beat itself to death trying.”
Eddie, a heroin addict, understands Roland to the core. “You’d use me and then toss me away like a paper bag if that’s what it came down to. God fucked you, my friend. You’re just smart enough so it would hurt you to do that, and just hard enough so you’d go ahead and do it anyway.” The word “retreat” isn’t in his vocabulary. Eddie tells him bluntly, “You’re as contrary as a hog on ice-skates.” Father Callahan is only a little more tactful when he implies that Roland is on occasion prone to mistaking his own will for ka.
Roland knows that by letting Jake fall so he could catch up with Walter, he has committed a conscious act of damnation. Mia tells Susannah, “The guilt of worlds hangs around his neck like a rotting corpse. Yet he’s gone far enough with his dry and lusty determination.” Roland’s way is the way of the gun—death for those who ride with him or walk beside him.
After losing fingers and toes to the lobstrosities on the beach at the Western Sea, he is no longer in a position to achieve his goals alone, even if he hadn’t been poisoned. Jamie once said that Roland could shoot blindfolded because he had eyes in his fingers. That he loses two fingers could be viewed as analogous to being partially blinded.
The group he assembles starts out as a means to an end, necessary to the completion of his journey. Before long, though, Roland finds his focus shifting. He’s aware of the trail of enemies and friends whose bodies he left scattered behind him, and believes that he may have found something more important than the Tower for the first time since he left Mejis. He’s not sure he can risk losing more friends. “There was a part of me that hadn’t moved or spoken in a good many years. I thought it was dead. It isn’t. I have learned to love again, and I’m aware that this is probably my last chance to love. I’m slow . . . but I’m not stupid.”
“Willpower and dedication are good words,” Roland says. “There’s a bad one, though, that means the same thing. That one is obsession.” He is Captain Ahab, and the Tower is his white whale. While his primary objective is to save the Tower from destruction, even when he achieves that by freeing the Breakers and saving Stephen King’s life, he is not content. He has one quest assigned by ka and another of his own choosing. When he continues past the Crimson King’s castle, he ventures beyond Gan and the prophecies of Arthur Eld, beyond ka itself. As Mia knew, he had to save the Beams because, if they had broken, the Tower would have fallen and he would never have been able to mount its staircase and find out what’s at the top.
When he tells Feemalo and Fimalo that he must press on to fulfill a promise he made to himself, they say he is as crazy as the Crimson King, who thinks he can survive the Tower’s destruction. His obsession is contagious. He knows that any of his ka-tet would carry on in his place if he fell. “I may have been a failure at my life’s greatest work, but when it comes to making martyrs, I have always done well.” [DT5] He wonders what he’s done to deserve such enthusiastic protectors. “What, besides tear them out of their known and ordinary lives as ruthlessly as a man might tear weeds out of his garden?”
As he emerges from his self-absorbed state, like Walter o’Dim he fears being called to account.4 “My score grows ever longer, and the day when it will all have to be totted up, like a long-time drunkard’s bill in an alehouse, draws ever nearer. How will I ever pay?” He denies being a good man. “All my life I’ve had the fastest hands, but at being good I was always a little too slow.”
He thinks followers of the traditional God learn that love and murder are inextricably bound and that in the end God always drinks blood. At times he is compelled to confess his actions, but he never seeks absolution. His one great fear is not that God is dead, but that He has become feebleminded and malicious. He still prays, but “it’s when folks get the idea that the gods are answering that the trouble starts.” He shuns the title Childe, a formal, ancient term that describes a gunslinger on a quest. “We never used it among ourselves, for it means holy, chosen by ka. We never liked to think of ourselves in such terms.”
As a gunslinger, he serves as a peace officer, messenger, accountant, diplomat, envoy, mediator, teacher, spy and executioner.5 He is a soldier of the White, a divine combination of training, observation and hair-trigger intuition, which is his version of the touch. His talents include reloading his weapons without pausing, hypnosis, counting a true minute, speaking five languages and running in the darkness. He can see much farther than any of his companions.
Eddie once mused that he had never seen the bottom of Roland’s purse, which was an endless source of needed items. Susannah thinks that after all their time together, she hasn’t come close to seeing the bottom of Roland. She’s seen him laughing and crying, sleeping, going to the bathroom, killing and dancing the Rice Song with skill and flair. She never slept with him, but thinks she’s seen him in every other circumstance, and he still has depths she’s never seen.
Things he cannot do: blend in to New York City culture, read English or pronounce words like “tuna” or “aspirin” and see television. His way of listening to stories his ka-tet tell of Keystone Earth bugs them. He listens like an anthropologist trying to figure out some strange culture by their myths and legends.
Both Cuthbert and Vannay warned Roland that failing to change and failing to learn from the past would be his damnation. He once believed that nothing in the universe could cause him to renounce the Tower. At the beginning of his career he was friendless, childless and heartless. Though he had once loved, he learns to love again. He loves his surrogate son, Jake, more than all the others, including Susan Delgado. When Jake dies, Roland is afraid that he has lost the ability to weep, but the tears finally come. He prays over Jake’s body, not because he thinks Jake needs a prayer to send him on his way, but to keep his mind occupied, to keep it from breaking.
Susannah, the only member of his ka-tet to leave without dying, believes that Roland even feels pity for Mordred. Whether he does or not, he kills his demon child after it kills Oy, putting an end to the line of Eld, mutated though it might have been. Roland has had three progeny—two real and one surrogate, and all are now gone, one before it was born.
When the time comes for Susannah to leave, he is suddenly afraid to be alone again and falls to his knees to beg her to stay. However, he must let her go—he owes her that much. His selfish desire to keep her with him is unworthy of his training and unworthy of how much he loves and respects her.
Roland suffers his final injury within sight of the Tower when he severs one of the remaining fingers on his right hand while plucking a rose. The hand goes numb to the wrist, and Roland suspects he will never feel it again.
Before he takes the last few steps toward the Tower, he sends Patrick back the way they came. Patrick is the surrogate for all those who have died during his millennium-long quest; the gunslinger won’t abandon him here at the end of End-World. He tells the boy they may meet again at the
clearing at the end of the path, but he knows there will be no clearing for him. His path ends at the Dark Tower.
Though standing so close to the Tower makes him feel like he’s in a dream, he realizes that nothing significant has changed. He’s still human, but he feels oddly relieved not to have his heavy guns hanging at his hips any longer. The killing has come to an end, but he is forced to remember all those he left behind as he climbs to the top of the Tower. Eventually, it becomes too painful to take in, and he sets his sights on the room at the top, but there’s nothing for him there except the punishment for having failed to change enough.
His existence is near perpetual reincarnation. Each time he is returned to the point in his journey where he is closing in on the man in black. Too late, he thinks, to make the important changes. Ka gives him credit, though, for the progress he has made, and Eld’s horn is his reward. If he can hold on to it through another iteration, maybe everything will be different next time and he will learn what the top of the Tower really holds for him.
Will he drop Jake again when torn between rescue and catching the man in black?
“I bear watching, as you well know.” [DT4]
John “Jake” Chambers
“Go then. There are other worlds than these.” [DT1]
Jake Chambers holds the record for the number of times someone dies in the Dark Tower series: three. Roland first encounters him at a way station for the coach line while crossing the desert in pursuit of Walter. Jack Mort, probably under Walter’s influence, pushed the boy in front of Enrico Balazar’s car, and he ended up in Mid-World after he was killed.
