by Vincent, Bev
Allie is the first to die, begging Roland to kill her because she fell for the man in black’s trap and used the magic word he left her in a note that would get Nort to tell what he experienced in the afterlife. In the chronology of the Dark Tower novels—though not in the gunslinger’s life—she is the first of those he cared for to die by his hands. The first sacrificial lamb.
By the end of his shooting spree, fifty-eight men, women and children lie dead in the dusty streets. The gunslinger’s only act of mercy before leaving Tull is to cut Nort down from where Sylvia Pittston and her followers had crucified him, laying his body with those of his townspeople. This is reminiscent of Odysseus, who backtracks on his journey home to tend to the body of one of his fallen comrades on Circe’s island. Respect for the bodies of the dead is an important part of classic and heroic fiction. Roland muses that, unlike Nort, the other townspeople will only have to die once.
The gunslinger finishes his story and spends the night at Brown’s hut. After two more weeks of travel across the desert, delirious and dehydrated, he approaches a way station for the coach line. He sees someone sitting in the inn’s shadow. Mistaking the figure for the man in black, and in spite of his weakened condition, he runs the last quarter mile, gun drawn, making no effort to hide. Not that there’s anything to hide behind. When Roland finally nears the Tower, a similar urge to drop everything and run pell-mell for his goal sweeps over him, but then he will have Patrick Danville and the loaded cart to hold him back.
Once he realizes the figure is a young boy, he has only enough presence of mind left to reholster his gun before collapsing. Jake Chambers has water and food ready for him when he awakens. Later, when Roland rescues Jake from the Tick-Tock Man in Lud, the first thing he does is provide water to slake Jake’s thirst. He remembers this moment and marvels at the role reversal. Sharing khef is an important ritual. Before the battle of Devar-Toi, Roland performs this ceremony with his ka-tet for the last time.
Jake says that the man in black—“the priest”—passed by sometime within the past two weeks, though his concept of time is unreliable. Jake hid, afraid the bypasser might be a ghost. Roland correctly assumes Walter knew Jake was there but left him as another trap. Roland can’t linger long at the way station. Neither can he leave the boy behind.
The boy doesn’t remember how he got to the way station. “I knew when I came here, but it’s all fuzzy now, like a bad dream when you wake up.” He vaguely remembers his home city, the Statue of Liberty and his school uniform.
The gunslinger hypnotizes Jake to learn more—a skill he acquired, ironically, from Marten, who is another guise of the man in black. While performing his dancing bullet trick, he muses about the nature of evil in his world and, for the first time, mentions the Dark Tower. “The gunslinger’s goal is not this half-human creature but the Dark Tower; the man in black—and, more specifically, what the man in black knows—is his first step on his road to that mysterious place.” [DT2, argument]
Jake reveals enough about his upbringing for the gunslinger to see similarities with his own. Through Jake, the gunslinger learns of New York City, a place that will play a pivotal role in his quest. All his life he accepted intellectually the idea of multiple worlds, but until now—and perhaps even now—he doesn’t believe such a place as New York could exist. “If so, it had only existed in the myth of prehistory.”22
Roland has been far beyond the world he knew for a long time and often encounters things he once thought were fictional. As a boy, he and his friends believed the Dark Tower didn’t exist except as a symbol. When he encounters a guardian of the Beam, he is again surprised to find myth become reality. He even wonders if Mid-World—as opposed to In-World, where Gilead was, and the desert borderland—is anything more than a rumor.
Ultimately, Jake remembers his death. Someone who resembles the man in black pushed him in front of a car. Roland later learns the pusher was Jack Mort, but Walter was likely nearby, orchestrating. Before bringing him out of his trance, the gunslinger asks Jake if he wants to remember his final moments or not. Jake chooses to forget.
While in the inn’s cellar looking for food, Roland hears a groaning sound and sees a hole forming in the foundation. From the other side, a Speaking Demon tells him, “While you travel with the boy, the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket.” Digging to get at the source of the voice, Roland finds only a rotting jawbone so large that he believes it belonged to one of the Great Old Ones, one of the creators.23 For no clear reason, he takes the bone with him when he clambers out of the cellar. “It occurred to him later that this was when he began to love the boy—which was, of course, what the man in black must have planned all along.”
King makes no secret of the fact that Jake’s future is grim. Before long, the gunslinger thinks of him as “the sacrifice.”24 Roland and the boy he will one day come to think of as his son, the makings of a ka-tet that won’t be complete until the middle of The Waste Lands, set out toward the mountains. Unbeknownst to them—and to readers until Wolves of the Calla—as they leave the way station behind, a figure who will play a significant role in Roland’s future—Father Callahan from ’Salem’s Lot—is drawn through from Earth in much the same manner as Jake was.
Before sending him through the UNFOUND door to Calla Bryn Sturgis as another trap for Roland, Walter points Jake and Roland out to Callahan, saying, “They’re following me . . . but I needed to double back and talk to you. . . . Now I must get ahead of them again—how else will I draw them on?” [DT5] Roland already suspects that the man in black is letting him catch up. “ ’Ware the man who fakes a limp,” he remembers his old instructor, Cort, saying.
After a few days, they are close enough to see the light of Walter’s campfire. During one of their afternoon rest periods, Roland recounts an incident from when he was eleven, the same age as Jake. Cort sentenced Roland’s friend and fellow gunslinger-in-training, Cuthbert, to an evening without supper as punishment for his behavior during lessons. Roland knows Hax, the west kitchen cook, will give them something to eat.
While they are eating dessert under the stairs near the kitchen, they overhear Hax, who has forgotten they are around, conspiring to send poisoned meat to Farson,25 an insurrectionist plotting against the Affiliation, centered in Gilead.26 The west is where failed gunslingers are sent in shame, so Hax’s position in the west kitchen is symbolic.
Roland reports their news to his father, Stephen Deschain, senior gunslinger and leader of Gilead, the last lord of the light. Hax is sentenced to hang for his treachery; Roland and Cuthbert ask permission to witness the execution. It is an important coming-of-age event for Roland. For the first time he sees death as a permitted punishment for disloyalty. Cort gives the boys bread to feed the birds that flock around the gallows, a scene echoed in Black House when Ty Marshall sees crows gathered around a gantry in End-World.
Within five years27 of that hanging, Roland’s land fell and both his parents were dead, his mother killed by his own hand. Only dimly conceived at this point, King wove elements of Roland’s history into subsequent books, culminating in Wizard and Glass, written twenty years after “The Way Station.” He also added some of these later-conceived details to the revised edition of The Gunslinger.
After two days in the foothills, Roland and Jake see the man in black, a tiny dot moving up the slope ahead of them, for the first time. Throughout his quest, Roland knows things without understanding why, but he trusts these intuitions. They will catch up with the man in black on the other side of the mountain. “The knowledge was strong in him . . . but it was not a good knowledge.” He knows that he will be tested when he catches Walter. He believes that the only way he can proceed to the next stage of his quest is through the man in black.
Roland’s dreams reveal more of his past, but it is a vision cloaked in mystery. He sees Susan Delgado, his beloved, dying in a fire. Susan warns him to watch out for Jake, who appears in the dream as a statue with a spike driven through his
forehead in the same place where Alice of Tull bore a scar.28 Not an auspicious omen.
He awakens to find Jake standing in a speaking ring, entranced by a succubus. Roland uses the jawbone from the way station as a talisman—or sigul—to free the boy from her grasp.29 The demon is a creature “with no shape, only a kind of unformed sexual glare with the eye of prophecy,” an ancient being cast ashore on the beach when the waters of the Prim receded. Roland knows that the demon will act as an oracle—for a price.
To prepare for his encounter, he ingests mescaline, which he tells Jake “wakes you up all the way for a little while.” Native Americans often used mescaline to enhance their receptivity to messages from their gods. Aldous Huxley advocated its use to open up the mind to new ideas in Doors of Perception. King said he was watching The Good, the Bad and the Ugly under the influence of the drug when he was inspired to start the Dark Tower series.30 It is extremely dangerous because the lethal dose is quite small. Roland dislikes its effects because “his ego was too strong (or perhaps just too simple) to enjoy being eclipsed and peeled back, made a target for more sensitive emotions.”
Like most prophecies, the oracle’s message raises more questions than it answers. The succubus tells Roland that the number 3 is his fate:31 a young man infested by a demon called heroin, a woman on wheels32 and a third, “Death . . . but not for you,” a nearly literal statement since the third is named Mort.
Jake is Roland’s gateway to the man in black, the demon says. Walter will show him the way to the three he needs to reach the Dark Tower. To save Jake, he would have to cry off from his quest. This he cannot do.
The demon’s nominal payment for her prophecy is sex, an encounter that nearly kills him. During his climax, Roland remembers the faces of women from his past. He thinks the vision of Susan Delgado is punishment meted out by the succubus for being forced to speak.33 He has no idea how profoundly his thirst for knowledge will impact his life. By agreeing to the oracle’s terms, Roland has set into motion the creation of his son, Mordred, whom he will share with Susannah Dean, the demon-turned-woman named Mia and his ultimate nemesis, the Crimson King. As in the legend of King Arthur, Mordred will hate his father from birth and pursue him with single-minded loathing. This is the real price Roland pays for the snippets of the future the oracle reveals.
The following evening, Roland tells Jake more about his homeland, New Canaan, the land of milk and honey, which no longer exists. He hasn’t been there since he started casting about for the trail of the man in black.34 There was a revolution, he says. “We won every battle, and lost the war.” Only three remain from the old world: the gunslinger, the man in black and the Dark Tower.35
The desert that almost killed Roland is now a distant memory as he and Jake climb toward the pass through the mountains. Water and food—in the form of rabbits—are no longer a worry. A week after they see a single footprint in a patch of snow, they catch up with their prey for the first time.
Though he’s only been in Roland’s land for a few weeks, Jake has fallen under ka’s influence. He now knows things without having to be told,36 including a certainty that Roland is going to kill him. He pleads with the gunslinger to turn back.
Roland tells Jake he will take care of him. On the heels of that self-serving lie—which will ultimately become the truth when Roland gets a second chance with Jake in The Waste Lands—they come face-to-face with the man in black, the master of lies. Acting out of instinct, the gunslinger shoots at his adversary even though he seeks information from him. “It’s not your bullets I fear, Roland. It’s your idea of answers that scares me,” he says. Walter promises to respond to Roland’s questions when they reach the other side of the mountain, but only when they are alone, a clear sign that Jake’s doom is at hand.
If Roland can’t bring himself to sacrifice Jake, he thinks he will be proven unworthy of his quest, but to whom? Even the man in black doesn’t know. If Roland plays his part, the man in black must play his. Roland genuinely believes Jake’s death is unavoidable but never pursues the question “Who requires such a price?”
If Roland is to redeem himself in future incarnations, he may have to find a way to the Tower without sacrificing Jake, entrusting ka to guide him. Or will “greedy old ka” always demand a sacrifice? As it says in the Book of Mark, “What does it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world but lose his own soul?” Or, in the words of Morgan Sloat, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, if he should lose his own son?” [TT]37
Facing the possibility of success after countless years of pursuit and hardship, Roland detaches himself emotionally from Jake. By choosing to follow Walter into the mountains, he consciously sentences Jake to death. “That was the moment at which the small figure before him ceased to be Jake and became only the boy, an impersonality to be moved and used.”38 He is a pawn to be sacrificed in favor of a greater victory. After Jake rejoins the ka-tet, Roland occasionally refers to him as “the boy” and immediately reprimands himself for doing so.
The fourth section, “The Slow Mutants,” puts Roland and Jake beneath the mountains. As it opens, Roland is telling Jake about how he and his friends Cuthbert and Alain39 spied from a balcony on the annual courting ball in the Great Hall of Gilead. Below them, the younger gunslingers danced while the older ones sat—seemingly embarrassed—at a great stone table.
Marten the counselor and enchanter sat next to Roland’s parents. Though still a boy, Roland recognized that his mother, the betrayer, formed a connection between Marten and his father. “What hand could have held the knife that did my father to his death?” he wonders, perhaps referring to his mother’s involvement in a plot to kill her husband, though Roland may be speculating that someone else in the court was responsible for his father’s death. Exactly how Stephen Deschain ultimately dies is never revealed, except that Marten arranged it.
Roland is talking nervously and angrily, needing to explain himself. Jake knows what lies ahead for him and isn’t very interested in Roland’s tale. He is angered by the games adults play and is aware that he’s a helpless participant in another one of those games right now.
Jake finds a railroad line and they decide to follow it. In the meager light, they see relics of the ancient world: lightbulbs, gasoline pumps, a sign labeled AMOCO. LEAD FREE. After several days walking blindly, they collide with an old handcar. Jake knows what it is, but the vehicle is unfamiliar to Roland, who is pleased by its operation. It’s the only functional old machine other than the pump at the way station he’s seen in years.40 It’s also the first of many trains that will play an important part in their quest, including Blaine, Charlie the Choo-Choo and the train that runs from Fedic through Thunderclap to Calla Bryn Sturgis.
They’re still traveling in darkness, but at a far greater pace. Roland, attuned to ka, senses that they are close to the end of the beginning.41 During one of their breaks, Jake asks Roland about his coming of age, which can also be considered the end of the beginning of Roland’s life.
“Love and dying have been my life,” Roland responds in the original version, as if this answers everything. He tells of the crucial day when Marten tricked him into taking his test against Cort before anyone thinks he’s ready. The enchanter summons him to his mother’s apartment. The scene speaks for itself—Marten’s clothing and appearance are disheveled. His mother wears only a gown and is clearly embarrassed to have her son see her like this.
Marten taunts and insults Roland, provoking him to lash out in anger. In a blind rage, Roland leaves the apartment, Marten’s laughter echoing in his ears. The enchanter and counselor to the gunslingers believes he’s accomplished his goal, the first of many occasions when he underestimates Roland.
Cort has trained three generations of boys to become gunslingers. Each, in his own time, has challenged him or, failing to find the requisite courage, dropped out to live a quiet life of self-imposed exile in a nearby barony. Those who defeated Cort became gunslingers. The others were immedia
tely sent west, into exile, never to see their families or homes again.
No one as young as Roland has ever succeeded at the challenge. The average age is eighteen. Stephen Deschain, the youngest ever to become a gunslinger, was sixteen. Even Cort implores Roland to reconsider, saying he is two years too early.42 Roland is fourteen, closer to being a man than a boy, but still young.
Roland picks his hawk, David, a faithful companion for many years, as his weapon. His future depends on what remaining fire the aging bird has left. David is the first of a long line of friends whom Roland betrays and uses in the furtherance of his objectives. His inspired choice of a weapon demonstrates his skill at improvisation, a talent that will follow him throughout his quest. Cort approves, though the salty tutor still thinks he will prevail.
When David claws his head, Cort bashes himself in the face to disable the bird, and it looks like Roland’s career as a gunslinger has ended before it begins. Broken and dying, David fights on his friend’s behalf, lashing and tearing at Cort’s face. The tutor can’t handle two assailants simultaneously. Roland breaks Cort’s nose and gains his teacher’s ironwood stick. Cort is still unwilling to cede the battle—he tries to counterattack, but Roland is ready and smashes Cort solidly on the side of the head.
Finally, Cort yields and surrenders the key to the chest containing Roland’s reward: his weapons. His birthright. Not the heavy, weighted sandalwood guns of his father, but transitional revolvers used by his father during his apprenticeship.
Before collapsing into a coma from which he isn’t sure he will ever recover, Cort offers Roland his last counsel as teacher: Let word of his accomplishments spread. The legend will grow in the retelling. Rather than immediately seeking his vengeance against Marten, Cort advises him to wait. Walter will later tell Roland this was bad advice, but the young gunslinger never gets the chance to decide whether to take it or not. After asking his friends to tend to their badly beaten teacher, Roland goes into town and spends his first night with a woman, a second rite of passage. The next morning, his father sends him to Mejis to keep him out of Marten’s reach.