The Road to The Dark Tower

by Vincent, Bev

  Though each member of his ka-tet discovers a new—and arguably better—life with the gunslinger, they, like Roland, are condemned to relive Roland’s closed-loop existence. Each time he returns to the desert, his trajectory will take him to the doorways that bring Jake, Eddie and Susannah from their former existences. Even if he takes a different course—if he refuses to sacrifice Jake, for example, or finds a way to the Tower without catching the man in black—there seems little chance that he could succeed in attaining the Tower without help.

  It’s a double-edged sword, though. If Roland were able to achieve his life’s goal—or somehow modify it—without needing to draw the three, he would be damning them to their former existences and depriving them of the life-altering opportunities they experienced with him. Their sole consolation would be that they only have to live their lives once.

  Ka is the wheel that turns the world. Sometimes it’s a big stone rolling down the hillside.

  The version of Roland’s personal quest—reaching and claiming the Tower—told in these seven books was doomed to failure before the opening pages. The missing horn of Eld, an item he needed to have in his possession when he reached the Tower, symbolizes a character flaw that he has not yet overcome—focusing on his purpose without considering the short-term consequences of his actions on himself and others. What does it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world but lose his own soul?

  Interestingly, the herald of change comes from outside his closed loop. That he now has Eld’s horn means that his personal evolution somehow extended its tentacles back into time and made him a slightly different person. Is this a gift from ka, a deus ex machina reward for the lessons he learned with his ka-tet? Perhaps Roland hasn’t truly looped back to a place in his past but has been elevated to a different level of the Tower, a version of reality where he made different—hopefully better—decisions along the way, improving his chances at success.

  The total elapsed time in Mid-World during the seven books of the series is about one year,32 not counting the indeterminate period of Walter and Roland’s palaver and other such time slips. Roland pursued Walter in the heat of summer. The ka-tet reached the Calla in fall, and Roland and Susannah crossed Empathica in winter. Roland sees the Tower for the first time on a spring morning. Time, of course, is not an easily measurable quantity in Mid-World, nor is it in our own, where faithful readers have traveled with Roland for more than two decades.

  How different the following year of Roland’s existence will be is left to readers’ imaginations. Maybe the next time he will take note of the flowing clouds Allie points out to him in Tull and realize that the Path of the Beam is close at hand. Will ka let him escape his humiliation on the Western Sea and still provide him with the ka-tet that will teach him about love and friendship, and whom he in turn will show the true value of their lives?

  Roland isn’t optimistic. In the Calla, while they prepare for the Wolves, he has the sense that he would fight battles similar to this one over and over for eternity. Sometimes, instead of losing fingers to a lobstrosity he might lose an eye to a witch, and after each battle he would sense the Dark Tower a little farther away instead of a little closer.

  Which begs the question: Where does perfection lie in Roland’s existence? Since the Tower still stands, even at his worst Roland has never made a serious enough mistake that he failed his primary quest and existence came to an end. Of course, he has ka on his side, pointing the way when he is at risk of going astray. Ka and Stephen King’s little gifts.

  What will he have to learn to break the cycle of repetition? To find a different path to the Tower that doesn’t involve sacrificing others? To abandon the quest after saving the Tower? That it is the height of hubris for a mortal to presume to understand God and the nature of existence? Maybe he will come to realize that the only way he will ever be free is to let the Tower fall, and then he will have to decide between the good of the one—himself—and the good of the many.

  Or perhaps the final door at the top of the Tower will lead him to a different fate should he ever reach nirvana. Perhaps he will someday find his way to the clearing at the end of the path, along with all those others who have gone on before, and learn whatever there is to be known of existence by those who reach this state.

  It’s a question with no easy answers that will surely engender discussion among readers for years to come.

  It may take him several more tries,33 but King leaves hope that eventually Roland will find what he seeks—his own humanity and the meaning of his existence—at the end of the road to the Dark Tower.

  ENDNOTES

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

  2 Like the paper boat does in It, the grains of poison that fall to the floor in The Eyes of the Dragon and the blue cell phone in Black House. In a few moments, Jake observes that Callahan, too, is gone from the story.

  3 King has changed enough of the local geography to maintain his family’s privacy.

  4 Perhaps named in tribute to Poe’s Roderick Usher from “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

  5 One poster reads VISIT SEPTEMBER 11, 2001.

  6 The ability to switch minds was one of Dr. Doom’s infrequently used powers. The Wolves who raided Calla disguised themselves with Dr. Doom masks.

  7 Sara Laughs was the name of Mike Noonan’s house in Bag of Bones. Mike goes on dream trips to the Fryeburg Fair that are reminiscent of todash trips.

  8 How Eddie planned to tote the collected works of Stephen King across Mid-World defies understanding.

  9 This section is called “The Shining Wire,” a reference to Watership Down by Shardik author Richard Adams. The Warren of the Shining Wire is a place where rabbits gave up their freedom for security and a sense of complacency. In the control room, Walter is overly complacent and will pay for his carelessness. “Every sunlit field of scampering rabbits conceals its shining wire of death,” King wrote in a review of a Harry Potter novel in the New York Times, July 23, 2000.

  10 Perhaps another allusion to King Lear, where Cornwall plucked out Gloucester’s eyeballs. Later, Mordred will feed Rando Thoughtful’s eyes to the castle rooks. Dandelo plucked out Patrick Danville’s tongue.

  11 Stanley, believed to be Sheemie’s father, was the bartender at Coral Thorin’s saloon. His mother was Dolores Sheemer, hence his nickname.

  12 Finli is reading The Collector by John Fowles, which reminds him of their situation, except he thinks their goals are nobler and their motivations higher than sexual attraction. King wrote a lengthy introduction for a Book of the Month Club reissue of this novel in 1989.

  13 The low man is named Trampas, the name of a character from The Virginian by Owen Wister, one of the books on the shelf Calvin Tower and Eddie carry into the Doorway Cave.

  14 Accounts of King’s accident were published by the global media. The specific details mentioned here come primarily from the Bangor Daily News and from King’s own account in On Writing.

  15 The first thing King wrote after his accident was a novella called “Riding the Bullet.”

  16 King reiterates this philosophy in his endnote to the short story “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French.” He says, “There’s an idea that Hell is other people. My idea is that it might be repetition.” [EE]

  17 A Mercedes-Benz. She and her husband also have a BMW, which Roland hears her describe as a “Beamer.”

  18 Roland can’t see the TV picture, just a bunch of lines that make his eyes water. Later, Irene watches Westworld, a movie starring The Magnificent Seven’s Yul Brynner about a robot cowboy that runs amok.

  19 Eddie told Cullum to stick around until at least 1986 for a doozy of a World Series.

  20 In the Mid-World game of Castles, the opposing sides are red and white.

  21 The labyrinth brings to mind the maze in Rose Madder.

  22 The Pubes in Lud thought there was a dead-line around the Cradle of Lud where Blaine slept.

>   23 Before that he was Austin Cornwell, from Niagara, but not in the Keystone World. He worked on advertising accounts for Nozz-A-La and the Takuro Spirit.

  24 He did mend Jake’s torn shirt while waiting for the mescaline to kick in near the oracle’s speaking ring, but leatherwork is more demanding.

  25 Named after the Robert Browning poem “Fra Lippo Lippi.”

  26 Stanzas I, II, XIII, XIV and XVI. See appendix VI.

  27 People from the Keystone World or Mid-World who are killed die in all worlds. However, Eddie and Jake aren’t from Keystone Earth, so their deaths (in Mid-World and Keystone Earth, respectively) aren’t existence-wide.

  28 Arthur Eld’s sword Excalibur was entombed in a pyramid like this before he extricated it.

  29 “Darkles” means “to become clouded or dark” or, perhaps, dim. The line “It darkles, (tinct, tint) all this our funnaminal world” appears in Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce.

  30 In Jewish folklore, the wandering soul of a dead person that enters the body of a living person and controls his or her behavior.

  31 Interview with Ben Reese, published on Amazon.com, May 2003.

  32 See appendix II.

  33 In Kingdom Hospital, a baseball player named Earl Candleton (Candleton is one of the stops on Blaine’s route) gets to go back to redo an important event in his life. In a personal communication, King said, “With us wretched humans, I think the wheel of Ka has to turn many times, with only small changes accreting, before changes for the better finally occur.”

  Chapter 9

  RELATED WORKS

  I’ve known for some time now . . . that many of my fictions refer back to Roland’s world and Roland’s story.

  [DT7]

  I am coming to understand that Roland’s world (or worlds) actually contains all the others of my making.

  [DT4]

  This business concerns the Dark Tower.

  [BH]

  Interconnections within Stephen King’s books are not a recent phenomenon. As early as The Dead Zone, characters in his novels referred to other King novels (“He set it on fire by his mind, just like in that book Carrie,” a character in The Dead Zone says). Characters and events from previous books recur, as in the Castle Rock novels.

  Many readers enjoy finding these cross-references. The authors of The Stephen King Universe1 catalog many such links and define two realities: the “real” world of Derry and Castle Rock, and the world of the Dark Tower. Some of the connections they make are clear and unequivocal; others are more tenuous.2

  The titles of King’s novels and story collections related to the Dark Tower series were bolded on the author ad-cards in the last three books of the series. Some of these books came as a surprise. Previously, no definitive link had ever been made between From a Buick 8 and the series. However, the Buick’s mysterious driver was strongly reminiscent of a low man, and the car itself appeared to be a portal to another world.

  Skeleton Crew was also a surprise member of this list, which comprised nineteen titles when it first appeared in Wolves of the Calla. Arguments could be made for several stories in this collection. Mrs. Todd’s shortcuts, for example, possibly took her by way of a thinny. Technological doorways to facilitate travel across vast distances were the subject of “The Jaunt.”

  However, according to King’s research assistant, Robin Furth, “The Mist” is the Dark Tower story in Skeleton Crew. In a personal communication, she theorized that the Arrowhead Project either created the first thinny, or else it ripped a hole into todash space. While the characters in “The Mist” believed Arrowhead caused some sort of genetic mutation, such things do not happen at the speed they occurred in the story. It is far more likely that the oversized creatures entered Maine through a tear between dimensions.

  Furth also commented that Mrs. Carmody seemed to be a twinner of Sylvia Pittston from The Gunslinger. Their sermons about the last times bear remarkable similarities.

  One book that occupies a borderland is It. There is clearly some relationship between Pennywise and the Crimson King, both of whom have business in Derry, Maine, and share the concept of deadlights. The Crimson King tells Ralph Roberts, “You may not know it, but shape-changing is a time-honored custom in Derry.” [INS] The appearance of the song of the Turtle in It represents at least the germ of an idea that King developed more fully in the Dark Tower, but beyond these elements and a few passing references like Stutterin’ Bill and an insane clown who feeds on emotions, the book does not contribute much to an understanding of the series.

  One other passage strengthens the link between It and the Dark Tower. The house on Niebold Street has wallpaper decorated with runners of roses and capering elves wearing green caps. At the house on Dutch Hill, “elves with strange, sly smiles on their faces capered on the wallpaper, peering at Jake from beneath peaked green caps.” [DT3]

  The books discussed in this chapter directly illuminate the series, either through the introduction of a major character or of crucial concepts. Starting in the early 1990s, King found it increasingly difficult to keep the Dark Tower out of everything else he wrote. The Crimson King, low men and Breakers all appeared first in nonseries novels. People reading the series for the first time might consider pausing after The Waste Lands to read these related works to experience the evolution of King’s mythos in the same way as people who read the books when they were published.

  In Song of Susannah, he calls the Dark Tower his übernovel. The Dark Tower is the nexus of all universes, an axle around which infinite realities rotate. In the Stephen King universe, the Dark Tower series is the axle around which his myriad fictional realities rotate.

  The Stand

  The Stand and The Eyes of the Dragon could be described as the two “Books of Flagg,” for they relate two exploits of Roland’s enemy. In the former, he tries to take over a devastated Earth similar to the one known to Jake, Eddie and Odetta. In the latter, he tries to overthrow the Kingdom of Delain, one of the baronies of In-World, the land of Roland Deschain. In both cases he ultimately fails, though he manages to wreak considerable havoc and destroy many lives.

  When Roland and his ka-tet arrive in Topeka at the end of their journey aboard Blaine the Mono, they find a world ravaged by a superflu very much like the one depicted in The Stand, a cataclysm Walter o’Dim takes credit for.

  The Stand is King’s first full-length exploration of a character who reappears in many names and forms in his work. Flagg is a shadowy character known as the Dark Man in a poem of the same name that King published in college. Some people think of him as the hardcase, which also derives from one of King’s college poems.3

  Randall Flagg doesn’t appear until well into The Stand, striding along US 51 from Idaho into Nevada. Drivers who pass him feel a slight chill. Sleeping passengers are touched with bad dreams. He is a tall man of no age wearing faded jeans and a denim jacket over well-worn, sharp-toed cowboy boots. His gunna is kept in an old, battered Boy Scout knapsack. His pockets are stuffed with pamphlets of conflicting opinions. “When this man handed you a tract you took it no matter what the subject.”4

  There was a dark hilarity in his face, and perhaps in his heart, too, you would think—and you would be right. It was the face of a hatefully happy man, a face that radiated a horrible handsome warmth, a face to make water glasses shatter in the hands of tired truck-stop waitresses, to make small children crash their trikes into board fences and then run wailing to their mommies with stake-shaped splinters sticking out of their knees. It was a face guaranteed to make barroom arguments over batting averages turn bloody.

  His hands are smooth and blank, with no life line or other lines.

  He’s well known among the lunatic fringe and “even the maddest of them could only gaze upon his dark and grinning face at an oblique angle.” For decades, he has been fomenting dissent across America, using names like Richard Fry, Robert Franq, Ramsey Forrest, Robert Freemont and Richard Freemantle. He can’t speak at rallies because when he tries
, microphones scream with feedback and circuits blow, but he writes speeches for those who speak and occasionally those speeches end in riots.

  He met Lee Harvey Oswald and was behind the Patty Hearst kidnapping, but he always escaped before the police arrived. “[A]ll they knew was there had been someone else associated with the group, maybe someone important, maybe a hanger-on.”

  Many are afraid to say his name because “they believed that to call him by name was to summon him like a djinn from a bottle.” They called him the Dark Man, the Boogeyman, the Walkin’ Dude, or even “Old Creeping Judas.” Glen Bateman says, “Call him Beelzebub, because that’s his name, too. Call him Nyarlahotep5 and Ahaz and Astaroth. Call him R’yelah and Seti and Anubis. His name is legion and he’s an apostate of hell and you men kiss his ass.”

  Mother Abigail believes she is part of a chess game between God and Satan. Flagg, or “the Adversary,” is Satan’s chief agent in this game. “He’s the purest evil left in the world.” The other little evils in the world are drawn to him, as are the weak and the lonely. “He ain’t Satan,” according to Mother Abigail, “but he and Satan know of each other and have kept their councils together of old . . . this man Flagg . . . is not a man at all but a supernatural being.”

  “All things serve the Lord. Don’t you think this black man serves Him, too?” Mother Abigail thinks God intends for them to confront Flagg. “It don’t do no good to run from the will of the Lord God of Hosts. A man or woman who tries that only ends up in the belly of the beast.”

  Sounds like ka and “all things serve the Beam.”

  Glen thinks Flagg is the last magician of rational thought, gathering the tools of technology against the forces of good. The Earth has been given to him to master, Flagg believes, though he doesn’t know by whom. He has a sense that some huge opportunity is presenting itself to him, that he is being reborn to his new destiny. “Why else could he suddenly do magic?”