The Road to The Dark Tower

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The Road to The Dark Tower Page 7

by Vincent, Bev


  He thought of that momentary dizziness earlier in the day, that sense of being almost untethered from the world, and wondered what it might have meant. Why should that dizziness make him think of his horn and the last of his old friends, both lost so long ago at Jericho Hill? He still had the guns—his father’s guns—and surely they were more important than horns . . . or even friends.

  Because of its dry, dark tone, the original version of The Gunslinger, like a threshold guardian, turned away many who wanted to join the quest. King’s revisions create a more internally consistent series of books for newcomers to the series. Whether it succeeds in its primary goal of being more accessible to readers who might have been turned away by the original remains to be seen.

  ENDNOTES

  1 Unless otherwise specified, all quotes in this chapter are from The Gunslinger.

  2 Inscription King often uses when signing copies of The Gunslinger.

  3 Walden Book Report, July 2003.

  4 Peter Straub and King finished writing The Talisman around the time Grant published The Gunslinger. The Eyes of the Dragon was probably written around the same time, as it was first published in 1984.

  5 The science fiction Bachman books The Running Man and The Long Walk notwithstanding. In 1982, few people knew about these books or that they were by King.

  6 “But what of the gunslinger’s murky past? God, I know so little. The revolution that topples the gunslinger’s ‘world of light’? I don’t know. Roland’s final confrontation with Marten, who seduces his mother and kills his father? Don’t know. The deaths of Roland’s compatriots, Cuthbert and Jamie, or his adventures during the years between his coming of age and his first appearance to us in the desert? I don’t know that either. And there’s this girl, Susan. Who is she? Don’t know.” [DT1, afterword]

  7 In the original version of the novel, Roland is first identified by name when he is in the cellar of the way station. King obviously knew his name before that because he mentions it in a teaser at the end of the “The Gunslinger” in F&SF magazine in 1978. In the revised and expanded edition, Roland’s name first appears at the end of the first section, about a third of the way through the book.

  8 The Art of Michael Whelan, Bantam, 1993.

  9 Edward Bryant, Locus magazine, Vol. 27, No. 6, December 1991.

  10 NewsNight with Aaron Brown, CNN, June 24, 2003.

  11 Interview with Amazon.com, May 2003. In an interview published on the Walden Books Web site, King said that eventually he would rewrite the entire series.

  12 www.stephenking.com, February 25, 2003.

  13 Foreword to The Gunslinger, Viking, 2003.

  14 Synopsis at the start of “The Way Station,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1980. These synopses are interesting because they are King’s commentaries on the story while he was in the process of writing it. See appendix V.

  15 King was inspired by the spaghetti westerns starring Clint Eastwood, who often went unnamed in those films. Jake Chambers makes the connection when he sees a movie poster featuring Eastwood on his way to Co-Op City.

  16 South in the original edition.

  17 The town is named after the rock group Jethro Tull, and the raven is named after a folksinger King knew at the University of Maine. Roland’s vision in the Wizard’s ball in Mejis included Brown and Zoltan, but he doesn’t remember most of what he saw.

  18 During the scene where Walter raises Nort, he says, “Mistah Norton, he daid,” in a sardonic tone, mimicking the manager boy’s words in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “Mistah Kurtz—he dead.” Susannah—as Detta—echoes these words later, speaking first of Joe Collins (Dandelo) and then Eddie.

  19 Roland’s course is changed from south in the original edition to emphasize the Beam’s proximity and influence.

  20 In the original edition, it is the man in black’s child she thinks she carries.

  21 A thousand years according to the expanded version; twenty-five years in the original.

  22 The expanded version says, “unless it was the mythic city of Lud,” which is New York’s twin.

  23 In the original version, this is where Roland is named for the first time.

  24 King doesn’t shy away from sacrificing children in his books, for example: Pie Carver (Desperation), Ralph Glick (’Salem’s Lot), Gage Creed (Pet Sematary), Cary Ripton (The Regulators) and Tad Trenton (Cujo).

  25 In the original version, Farson is the name of a place, but King mistakenly changes him to John Farson in subsequent books. In the revised edition, King corrects this error by changing the town of Farson to Taunton.

  26 Gilead is never mentioned in the original version of the book. When Roland and Eddie meet King in Song of Susannah, he says he hasn’t thought of the Gilead part when Roland introduces himself. On Earth, Gilead is a region of Jordan located between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea, best known for the “balm of Gilead,” an aromatic gum used as a medicine, which is mentioned in Poe’s “The Raven.”

  27 Ten years in the original edition.

  28 The same place as Father Callahan’s cross-shaped scar and where the Crimson King’s minions bear open wounds that don’t bleed.

  29 In the Bible (Judges 13–16), Samson killed a thousand Philistines armed only with the jawbone of an ass. Sylvia Pittston refers to Samson in her sermon, and Aaron Deepneau mentions Samson’s riddle in The Waste Lands.

  30 Master’s Tea, Yale University, April 21, 2003.

  31 In the revised edition, “another number comes later,” referring to the importance of 19 in the final three books.

  32 The original edition continued, “her mind is iron but her heart and eyes are soft.”

  33 Roland reflects on this when the subject of mescaline and hallucinogenic mushrooms comes up outside Calla Bryn Sturgis.

  34 In the original version he says he hasn’t seen New Canaan for twelve years, but in the revised edition, King changes this to “unknown years.” The confusion of time that makes up Roland’s life is something that even the Calvin scholars could never resolve.

  35 There were others, including Sylvia Pittston and Sheb from Tull, but they are now dead, too. Sheemie Ruiz from Mejis, who was with Roland when he and his fellow gunslingers set out on their quest for the Tower, is still alive, though Roland doesn’t know it. King mentions Sheemie in the revised edition, foreshadowing his importance not only in Wizard and Glass but also in The Dark Tower.

  36 Each of the New Yorkers who join Roland’s quest develops special talents shortly after his or her arrival in Mid-World. Jake’s is known as the “touch,” a talent he shares with Alain Johns, a member of Roland’s earliest ka-tet.

  37 Sloat, the villain, has enough moral awareness to raise the question, but he comes to the wrong conclusion.

  38 Revised edition. The original text is worded a little differently.

  39 Jamie in the original version.

  40 In the revised edition, the handcar—like many other machines in Mid-World—talks, but Roland soon silences it.

  41 Roland often identifies crucial transitions in his quest: the end of the beginning, the beginning of the end, etc.

  42 The original version says five years too early. This is unlikely since that would make him nineteen, older than the average, but Roland is the most promising student Cort has had in decades.

  43 The original title of this section, “The Gunslinger and the Dark Man,” is changed to “The Gunslinger and the Man in Black” in the revised edition.

  44 In English, the word “palaver” usually refers to a discussion between people from different cultures or levels of sophistication, and can also mean misleading or idle talk. In Mid-World, though, it usually refers to a meeting where important information is to be exchanged.

  45 In the revised edition, the last clause is replaced with “as you resume your quest.” King hints about the cyclical nature of Roland’s existence—with the new subtitle, RESUMPTION, for example—without giving the ending away. Roland i
s very close to the Tower in time—but in the wrong direction. After reaching the Tower, he is sent back to a point little more than a month before where he is now.

  46 Near the Tower, Susannah Dean echoes this sentiment; death for everyone else who walks and rides with him, but never for him. Another hint at Roland’s cyclical existence—he won’t reach the clearing at the end of the path even after a thousand-year journey. The list of the dead includes Susan Delgado, Cuthbert, Alain, Jamie, Jake (three times), Oy, Callahan, Sheemie, Eddie, Mia, Mordred and Walter himself.

  47 In the original text, Walter says “to Marten” instead, implying that they are separate entities.

  48 In the original version, Walter claims to be a minion of the Tower, and he says that Earth has been given into his hand (that is, Walter’s) rather than to the red king. The Crimson King was introduced in Insomnia, but before the revised edition appeared his first, brief mention in the series proper was in Wizard and Glass. Roland, though, doesn’t understand who the Crimson King is until late in his journey.

  49 In 1985, Ben Indick expressed doubt over whether the bones belonged to the man in black. [“Stephen King as an Epic Writer,” Ben Indick, in Discovering Modern Horror I, Darrell Schweitzer, ed., Starmont Press, 1985.]

  50 In the foreword to the new edition of The Gunslinger, King writes, “Dark Tower purists (of which there are a surprising number—just check the Web) will want to read the book again, of course, and most of them are apt to do so with a mixture of curiosity and irritation. . . . I’m less concerned with them than with readers who have never encountered Roland and his ka-tet.”

  51 Interview with Walden Book Report, July 2003.

  52 Brown’s deceased wife was of the Manni.

  Chapter 3

  THE DRAWING OF THE THREE (RENEWAL)

  Three. This is the number of your fate. . . . The three are your way to the Dark Tower.

  [DT1]

  One reason King had trouble returning to the Dark Tower epic was his professed ambivalence toward his protagonist. Though Roland started out as a mysterious knight errant akin to Clint Eastwood’s man with no name, he is driven by urges that make him seem like a borderline sociopath. He bedded Alice in Tull but had no troubled dreams after he killed her and everyone else in town. When he let Jake fall to his death so he could palaver with the man in black, Roland teetered on the edge of becoming either an antihero or “no hero at all.” [DT6]1

  A substantial part of the second book takes place in familiar territory, New York, whereas The Gunslinger was set entirely in Roland’s world. This—in addition to the increased number of major characters—may have made The Drawing of the Three more accessible to King’s readership. Many readers were encouraged to start the series with this book, backtracking later to learn the details of Roland’s trek across the desert beyond what’s summarized in the argument. It’s not an unreasonable approach. The Gunslinger can be treated as a flashback similar to the central story in Wizard and Glass.

  Though Roland makes no geographic progress in his quest for the Dark Tower in The Drawing of the Three—his trek north along the beach is almost in the opposite direction to where he needs to go—he assembles the team who will accompany him across the thousands of miles he has ahead. He still doesn’t know how to get to the Tower; he hasn’t yet encountered one of the Paths of the Beam to point him in the right direction, and he overlooked the significance of what Allie noticed about the clouds all flowing southeast across the desert.

  Until now, Roland Deschain has left behind everyone who started the quest for the Dark Tower with him or helped him along the way, most of them dead. Roland is capable of completing his quest alone and seems content to do so. He finds companionship and rejects it. Part of the difficulty some readers had with The Gunslinger may lie in the fact that the first book is locked inside the head of a man who doesn’t yield up his secrets easily. In The Drawing of the Three, Roland is forced to embrace companionship; he has little other choice.

  The book closely follows the structure of Walter’s tarot reading. The people behind the cards enter the story. Vignettes between these major sections are called “Shuffle,” playing off the multiple implications of the word “drawing” in the title—drawing cards from a deck, drawing people from another reality.

  The book starts a few hours after Roland arrives at the Western Sea. He falls asleep on the beach, exhausted from his preternaturally long palaver with Walter and the relentless chase leading up to it. He isn’t aware of the tide coming in around him until the freezing water reaches his guns and ammunition belt, nor does he notice the four-foot-long lobsterlike monstrosities that have come in with it.

  In a few minutes, Roland’s ability to fulfill his destiny is severely compromised. Some of his precious ammunition supply gets wet. Worse, in a stupor and preoccupied with preventing any more of his bullets from being ruined, he misjudges the threat posed by the lobstrosities. He loses the trigger and middle fingers from his dominant right hand, a chunk of his lower calf, a toe and a boot to one of the creatures. His responses are dulled by an overpowering exhaustion the likes of which he will not see until the night before he reaches the Tower. He feels only the numbing dread that occurs when something life altering happens but the mind hasn’t fully processed the implications yet. “I see serious problems ahead,” he thinks remotely.

  For a man whose identity is completely defined by being a gunslinger, Roland’s injuries—especially the loss of his fingers—are grievous. The first time he draws his gun he drops it in the sand. “What had once been a thing so easy it didn’t even bear thinking about had suddenly become a trick akin to juggling.” When he finally learns how to work his damaged hand, the hammer falls on dud ammunition. He can no longer rely on the iconic weapons passed down from the beginning of time, their barrels forged from Arthur Eld’s sword. They may not fire when he needs them. Some bullets are obviously ruined; the rest are merely questionable.

  And with thousands of miles to travel to the Dark Tower, he now has only one boot and no big toe on his right foot, though it isn’t a serious enough injury to stop him from dancing before the Calla-folken several months down the road.

  These injuries imperil his long-term chances of success. Of more immediate concern, though Roland doesn’t realize it yet, is the infection at work in his wounds. He has no means of fending off a microscopic enemy. All he can do is sprinkle the stumps of his fingers and toe with tobacco to stop the bleeding, and bind his wounds with bandages torn from his shirt.

  His training usually prevents Roland from losing control, but the direness of his situation pushes him briefly over the edge, as it did after Jake fell to his death. In a fit of rage, he squashes the lobstrosity with a rock and crushes its head with his remaining boot, stamping on it over and over again. “It was dead, but he meant to have his way with it all the same; he had never, in all his long strange time, been so fundamentally hurt, and it had all been so unexpected.”

  Without live ammo, his revolvers are “no more than clubs.” He separates the twenty bullets that are probably okay from the batch of about forty that may or may not fire when called upon. While he cleans his revolvers, his missing digits haunt him. “Go away,” he tells them when they throb. “You are ghosts now.”

  He struggles up the beach away from the water, away from where he was maimed, collapsing in the shade of a Joshua tree. When he awakens the next day, he sees the first signs of the fast-acting infection. Roland has faced many opponents in the centuries he has traveled thus far, but the poison in his system threatens to defeat him. In his inimitably dry manner, Roland sums up his situation:

  I am now a man with no food, with two less fingers and one less toe than I was born with; I am a gunslinger with shells which may not fire; I am sickening from a monster’s bite and have no medicine; I have a day’s water if I’m lucky; I may be able to walk perhaps a dozen miles if I press myself to the last extremity. I am, in short, a man on the edge of everything.

  Here
is another way that The Drawing of the Three differs from its predecessor—tension. In The Gunslinger, Roland often told his story in flashback, which adds a layer of abstraction to the story. Since he’s reminiscing over these events, it’s clear he survived whatever dangers he faced. In the second volume, Roland is in crisis mode from the very beginning, and the tension and pace rarely let up. He goes from one problem to the next with barely a breath in between.

  For no reason other than that his heart tells him it is right, Roland goes north.2 The man in black, convinced he has tricked Roland into thinking he was dead, watches the gunslinger struggle along the beach. Satisfied that he is unlikely to complete his mission, Walter goes in the opposite direction and escapes through a doorway.

  In three hours, Roland manages only four miles along the beach, falling twice. He sees something in the distance and crawls the last quarter mile on his elbows and knees. Without help—and soon—Roland may never leave the Western Sea.

  Fortunately, Roland’s creator has decided he needs new friends. Long ago he set out on this quest with a group of comrades who perished defending Gilead. The time has come for Roland to assemble a new ka-tet, akin to the gathering of the Fellowship that assists Frodo in taking the One Ring to Mordor in The Lord of the Rings.

  The oracle foresaw three in his future who would be his way to the Tower, and Walter told him he had the power of drawing. Short- and long-term prophecies come to fruition through the gunslinger. Roland’s Fellowship, though, will not be composed of kings-in-exile and wizards. It’s a ka-tet of damaged souls. Eddie Dean summarizes the group this way: “First you got your basic white junkie, and then you got your basic black shoplif[ter].” The Fellowship is rounded out by a gunslinger missing his trigger finger, a young boy whose parents were oblivious to his existence and a billy-bumbler kicked out of its pack for being too uppity.

 

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