by Vincent, Bev
Like David, Jake is a weapon to be sacrificed in the name of the Tower. “Am I ready to throw this boy at the man in black?” he wonders. He dismisses the boy, hearing an echo in his words—Marten dismissing Roland from his mother’s chamber.
Jake wonders if he underestimated the gunslinger when Roland saves him from the Slow Mutants who attack them the next day. Drawn by Roland’s and Jake’s life forces, these disfigured creatures—maimed by ill-advised wars and disastrous experiments by the Old Ones or from working too close to the King’s Forge—swarm around the handcar. Roland shoots those he can, but there are too many. They grab Jake, threatening to pull him off the car. Roland isn’t ready to give up the boy yet. He knows this isn’t the right place for a sacrifice. He fights for the boy’s life, finally pulling him to safety.
Roland surprises Jake a second time, sending him into the darkness to remove stones blocking the track. Again, Jake’s suspicions that he is being offered in sacrifice are disproved. Roland keeps the mutants at bay long enough for Jake to clear the track and regain the handcar.
Several days later, Jake and Roland see light for the first time in over a week, and they enter a chamber containing a switching station for a series of train lines. The tunnel they enter has a sign saying TRACK 10 TO THE SURFACE AND POINTS WEST. Though he defeated Cort many years earlier, Roland is headed west after all.
The central terminal, which reminds Jake of a subway station, is another reminder that things in the world are winding down. The shops contain relics of a long-ago era. The recirculator makes a grating noise, and the air has a mechanized taste. After thousands of years of operation, it won’t last much longer.
Jake’s confidence fails him. He doesn’t want to go any farther. “You won’t get what you want until I’m dead,” he says. To his surprise, the gunslinger agrees and pretends to leave. “How easily you bluff this young boy,” Roland thinks, hating himself, knowing Jake has no one else in this world who will see to his survival, short as it may be.
For a moment, Roland is tempted to turn away from his quest and wait until Jake is older, the center of a new force. It’s not his first such thought—while in Mejis, he considered running away with Susan Delgado. “The Tower did not have to be obtained in his humiliating nose-rubbing way, did it?” he wonders. But Roland knows that to turn back means death for both of them, and for all of creation.
Jake falls for the gunslinger’s bluff and runs after Roland, who resists the brief urge to speed up and leave him behind. Holding Jake, who had to leap on board to catch up, Roland knows that the end—in whatever form it is to come—is very close.
Their last obstacle is a rickety trestle within sight of the tunnel’s end. Jake distrusts the bridge and urges Roland to abandon the handcar. They can easily walk the rest of the way. After inspecting the decrepit bridge, Roland agrees. Rotten crossties break under their feet, and there are wide gaps in places.
The arduous crossing foreshadows the bridge Roland and his followers will cross outside Lud. As in that future crossing, the bridge fails Jake. With the end of the tunnel in their grasp, the man in black appears and, simultaneously, Jake falls. Roland is torn between two crises, a situation he will face often during his quest. Sometimes he and his ka-tet can find a way to handle multiple problems in turn, but this time Roland must choose one crisis or the other. Jake is dangling over the deep chasm, pleading for help, but the man in black says, “Come now . . . or catch me never.”
The boy or the Tower? Roland can’t resist the lure of his quest; he abandons Jake, who plummets to his second death. Though King later tries to accept the blame for having written Jake into this situation, ultimately the author says that Roland acted on his own. The boy’s final words haunt the gunslinger: “Go then. There are other worlds than these.”
Walter tells Roland, without explaining why, that this sacrifice was necessary to allow the creation of the doorways from which he will draw his ka-tet. Necessary or not, Roland considers himself damned by his betrayal, though he does achieve some measure of redemption later.
Enraged, Roland empties both guns at the man in black, but the enchanter merely laughs. “You kill me no more than you kill yourself.” Roland’s In-World weapons would have no effect on Walter anyway, as he discovers in the Emerald Palace many months in the future. In the revised edition, Walter tells him his guns don’t open doors, “they only close them forever.”
Clear of the mountains, the railway tracks are worn away as if they had never been. Their disappearance is symbolic, for soon Jake too will fade from the gunslinger’s memory as if he had never crossed over at the way station. Walter calls Jake Roland’s Isaac, but Roland doesn’t recognize the reference to Abraham, who was ordered by God to sacrifice his son. “I was never a scholar of [the Bible],” Roland says.
Thus begins the story’s denouement.43 The man in black leads Roland to a Golgotha—a place of skulls and death—and commands him to gather wood for a fire, like Roland ordered Marten countless years earlier in his mother’s chamber. Walter’s ordinary appearance disappoints Roland. The enchanter bears “none of the marks and twists which indicate a person who has been through awesome times and who has been privy to great and unknown secrets.” Roland refuses the rabbit the man in black cooks, instead eating the last of his jerky.
They begin their palaver44 after the sun disappears from the sky. “You won’t see another sunrise for what may seem a very long time,” the man in black tells Roland. He produces a customized tarot deck to tell Roland’s future. “I suspect I’ve never read one quite like yours,” he says. “You are the world’s last adventurer. Yet you have no idea how close you stand to the Tower now, how close in time.”45 Thousands of miles down the road, as Roland draws near to his goal, he thinks that Walter’s deck was probably stacked.
The gunslinger’s card is the Hanged Man, signifying strength. The second card, the Sailor, represents Jake. “He drowns, gunslinger, and no one throws out a line.” The remaining cards lay out Roland’s future, starting with those who will accompany him. The Prisoner card shows a baboon holding a whip, astride a young man’s back. This is Eddie, the addict, a man with a monkey on his back. The Lady of Shadows card shows a woman smiling and sobbing at the same time. A Janus, indicating the dual personalities of Odetta and Detta, who will become Susannah Dean.
The fifth card is Death—“yet not for you.” Indeed, many friends have died and will die during Roland’s quest.46 These four cards surround Roland’s like satellites circling a star. The man in black places the sixth card, the Tower, directly over Roland’s card and refuses to explain its meaning or why he is showing Roland these things. Questions appear to anger him.
The seventh and final card is Life—“but not for you.” The man in black does not place this card in tableau but instead tosses it into the fire. Neither Roland nor the man in black are meant to know its meaning, which perhaps signifies the way the gunslinger will never live out his normal course of days unless he solves the great puzzle of his life. Like the missing horn of Eld, it may be an indication that Roland’s personal quest will fail this time.
“Sleep now . . . Perchance to dream,” the man in black tells Roland, echoing Hamlet’s soliloquy. He narrates Roland’s vision, a traditional creation drama, starting from a void, introducing light, stars, the Earth, water, land, plants and animals. Roland sees more of the solar system than he ever knew existed. The word “universe,” which Walter calls the Great All, is unfamiliar to him.
At one point, the narration seems to expand beyond Walter to some greater being, never identified, perhaps the Voice of the Turtle. Later, in the presence of Black Thirteen, Roland will understand that he was sent todash by the residual effects of that Wizard’s orb, which was recently in Walter’s hands. During his todash journey, Walter hypnotizes Roland.
When the dream overwhelms him, he pleads for it to end. The man in black urges him to renege. “Cast away all thoughts of the Tower. Go your way, gunslinger, and begin the long
job of saving your soul.” Roland summons the strength to utter his “final, flashing imperative.” In the closing moments of the vision, revealed by the man in black but unseen by him, Roland sees something of cosmic importance: a tiny purple blade of grass.
When he wakes up, the man in black congratulates him on his resilience. “I never could have sent that vision to your father.47 He would have come back drooling.” Even so, he says Roland will never complete his quest. “The Tower will kill you half a world away.” He claims to be “the furthest minion of he who now rules the Dark Tower. Earth has been given into that king’s red hand.”48 “I am not the great one you seek. I am only his emissary.”
When Roland tells him about the blade of grass, the man in black seems confused. Walter’s failure to see everything that was revealed in the vision shows Roland that he has weaknesses. He may have facilitated the dream, but he didn’t cause it, in a manner akin to how fictional Stephen King facilitates the Dark Tower story without causing or creating it.
Walter tells Roland the history of his world, starting hundreds of generations in the past when Roland’s world was much like Earth, with advanced technology, cures for cancer and space travel—a time that had a wealth of information but no insight. Though Roland knows that Walter is not to be trusted, at least some of what he learns about the Crimson King (originally called the Beast), the keeper of the Tower, is partly true.
His intention is to discourage Roland with the magnitude of his task, arguing that the universe they occupy may be merely an atom on a blade of grass that exists for only a day or two in another reality. “If a scythe cuts off the blade, would the rot of it dying seep into our own universe and our own lives? . . . We say the world has moved on; maybe we really mean that it has begun to dry up.” Walter asks Roland if he would dare take on the enormity of the room at the top of the Tower where all universes meet, a room resting above the sum of all realities. “Someone has dared,” the gunslinger responds. “God has dared . . . or is the room empty?”
Roland and Walter talk through the night, but the gunslinger remembers little of it later. “To his oddly practical mind, little of it seemed to matter.” What he does recall pertains directly to his quest. He is to go to the sea, twenty easy miles to the west, where the heretofore unknown power of drawing that Roland possesses will be expressed. Walter says that he is compelled to provide Roland with this information partly because he sacrificed Jake but also because it is the “natural law of things.” At the sea, Roland will draw three. “And then the fun begins,” the man in black concludes.
Roland is right in thinking that little of what Walter tells him is important to his quest. The oracle had already told him about the three people he will draw. Knowing the number is vital to his future survival because he and Eddie will push Odetta farther north along the beach, reasonably confident that they will find another door. Beyond the metaphysics lesson, the sum total of Walter’s useful information is this: Go west. For this he sacrificed Jake?
One of the most significant changes King makes in the revised version is to clarify the fact that Walter—the man in black—and Marten are the same person, or different facets of the same being. Walter admits to having been both Marten and a member of his entourage known to Roland. He claims that Roland will have to kill the Ageless Stranger before he can reach the Tower without revealing that this is Flagg, yet another of his own guises.
Roland awakens to find himself ten years older, or so he perceives. Exactly how much time has elapsed is impossible to ascertain. Walter tells Mordred, “We were in one of the fistulas of time which sometimes swirl out from the Tower, and the world moved on all around us as we had our palaver in that bony place.”[DT7] Long enough for Roland’s hair to thin and turn slightly gray, and for his campfire to seem to petrify, but not necessarily as long as Walter would have Roland believe. The bones that are supposed to be Walter’s decomposed body were arranged by the sorcerer to mislead the gunslinger.
He later says to Mordred, “I could have killed him then, but what of the Tower if I had, eh?” [DT7] Though Walter claims he allowed himself to be caught, he will later imply that he was terrified of the gunslinger and afraid for his own life. Perhaps that’s one of Walter’s lies, or maybe ka is using Walter in ways that he isn’t aware of.
Roland doubts the skeleton is really Walter.49 He knows that the man in black has told him many lies. On impulse, he breaks off the jawbone and sticks it in his pocket, a replacement for the one he gave Jake in the oracle’s speaking circle. Since it wasn’t Walter’s, the jawbone has no real power other than to prove later to Roland’s confused mind that Jake did exist.
The first book ends when Roland reaches the Western Sea. Once this sea was only a thousand miles from Gilead, but the world is expanding and his journey has taken him many times farther than that. Neither time nor distance remains constant. He dreams that he would “some day come at dusk and approach, winding his horn, to do some unimaginable final battle” at the Dark Tower.
In “The Politics of Limited Editions,” King writes, “Roland doesn’t change substantially in The Gunslinger, but the potential for and the promise of change come through strongly.” How much his capacity for change evolves on subsequent iterations of his journey will determine whether or not he ultimately succeeds in discovering what exists at the top of the Tower—or whether he decides that, having saved it, he needs to go to the Tower at all.
King’s decision to revise a twenty-year-old book is certainly controversial50 but not unprecedented in King’s publication history. He frequently updated short stories when preparing them for collections. During the process of restoring excised material that had been removed from The Stand prior to its 1977 original publication, he moved the story ahead a decade and rewrote sections. Of The Gunslinger, King says, “It actually seemed not so much like a luxury . . . but like a real necessity, to say, ‘Let’s make this book more readable; let’s make it more exciting; let’s pick up the pace a little bit and really try to draw readers in.’ ”51
His revisions create a situation not unlike the one Roland finds himself in at the start of The Waste Lands. He has two slightly different versions of his past: the reality where he encountered Jake in the desert and the one where the way station was empty. With The Gunslinger, there is a reality where Walter may not be Marten, Roland doesn’t learn about the Crimson King and his trek takes him south instead of southeast.
King’s changes occur on almost every page. Some are simple reworkings of awkward, self-conscious writing—“hollow blather,” as he calls it in the foreword. He removed most adverbs—following his own advice in On Writing—and clarified numerous cases of pronouns with uncertain antecedents. In the original version, Roland occasionally spoke in 1970s slang, saying things like, “Dig?”
King changes dialogue in numerous places to adopt the distinctive language used in later books, things like “if it do ya fine,” “say thank ya,” and “thankee-sai.” He replaces the seasons with their Mid-World equivalents, Fresh Earth and Reaping, for example. Anonymous characters, like Cort’s predecessor and the gunslinger who hangs Hax, are given names. Obscure references (“like a Kuvian night-soldier”) are gone.
A second level of changes could be called “bug fixes,” addressing continuity errors that crept into the story. Roland no longer reads magazines in Tull—unlikely since paper is such a scarce commodity. References to electric lights are replaced with “spark lights.” Alain Johns is frequently called Allen in the original. King addresses the temporal confusion pertaining to the span of Roland’s quest, which was alternately either measured in decades or millennia, by being less specific.
The third types of changes are those where King introduces elements that he hadn’t yet conceived in the 1970s. Gilead is never mentioned in the original version, nor are Arthur Eld, the Crimson King, Sheemie, the Manni,52 taheen, Algul Siento, bumblers or the commala dance. He foreshadows the loss of Roland’s fingers and the ka-tet’s discovery of the
Beam (Allie notes that the clouds all flow in a particular direction). Sylvia Pittston’s sermon presages both Roland’s discovery of the jawbone at the way station and his meeting with Walter at the Golgotha.
King also strengthens Jake’s character through the subtle use of dialogue. The boy was often passive and silent in the original, but he now speaks his mind more frequently. Jake understands what he is to Roland, and he spares no occasion to let the gunslinger know he’s aware. King deletes narrative descriptions of the boy with negative connotation, things like “with dumbly submissive sheep’s eyes” or a scene where he compares the boy’s pounding chest to the beat of a chicken’s heart.
Roland’s relationship with Allie in Tull is subtly more intimate, too. When Allie warns Roland that the hostler is likely to make things up if he doesn’t know them, Roland thanks her and she is touched beyond measure, unable to remember the last time someone who mattered thanked her. Roland also shows his concern for her when he counsels her to forget Walter’s message, to banish the word “nineteen” from her mind rather than use it to access Nort’s memories of what happened to him in death.
Finally, King injects a number of hints about the cyclical nature of Roland’s existence, adding the sense of dizziness brought about by his shift backward in time. Walter frequently mentions how Roland never manages to get it right, though the gunslinger doesn’t understand. “What do you mean, resume? I never left off.” King also draws more attention to Roland’s missing horn, a crucial factor in the series’ final pages.