by Vincent, Bev
Is Roland’s land a postapocalyptic version of Earth? That’s one possible explanation. There seems to have been some sort of radiation incident in Mid-World’s history causing mutations in people and livestock. The bloodlines are beginning to clarify in some regions (the so-called “threaded stock”) and there are fewer mutants, but in other places the lingering effects of whatever cataclysm took place are still in evidence. Slow Mutants, horribly deformed humans, lurk beneath the mountains Jake and Roland traverse. The region beyond Lud is a wasteland that the ka-tet could never have survived without riding Blaine the Mono. In the Territories, another of Mid-World’s borderlands, nuclear testing in one reality created the Blasted Lands in the other.
Even if all realities, which number beyond telling, began at a common point—and nothing in the Dark Tower series requires this—time is free to travel at different speeds from one reality to another, a phenomenon that the ka-tet has to contend with as their quest proceeds. Time passes more slowly in Jake’s world than in Mid-World, but faster in Keystone Earth. Roland’s land may represent a reality that evolved similarly to Earth but at a faster rate, proceeding beyond the currently known state of things to some undefined cataclysm that destroyed everything. How else to explain the preponderance of things in Mid-World that are known on Earth—machinery, oil plants, the Bible, “Hey Jude”?
Another explanation is that people in Mid-World borrowed these things from Earth by traveling through the doorways that connect realities. Blaine the Mono knows about Earth culture because of doorways. In his supersonic travels he may even have crossed the boundaries between worlds in thin places, which would explain how he derails in an Earth-like version of Topeka. The Manni have often passed between worlds, and the travel posters and brochures near some doorways in New York and Fedic indicate that Earth was a popular tourist destination for Mid-Worlders in times gone by. The only place on Earth where this interdimensional travel is noticeable is in western Maine, where walk-ins started appearing in the late 1970s.
Of the infinite worlds, only two are important to the continuation of existence: Mid-World, also known as the Tower Keystone, and Keystone Earth. The Tower exists as itself only in Mid-World. In many others it is a rose or an immortal tiger. In at least one it is the ur-dog Rover. In one version of Earth it may be a black hotel in California.
Keystone Earth is different from all others in that time flows in only one direction. Roland and his followers can travel across todash space into Keystone Earth, but each time they will arrive later than the time before.23 If they make mistakes, they can’t double back and fix things. Roland says that in Keystone Earth most species still breed true, many lives are sweet and there is still energy and hope. Each world has its own ka—the ka of 19 in one and the ka of 99 in the other.
Since shortly after the beginning of creation, when the Prim receded, an order of men arose whose purpose is protecting the Tower and the Beams of power that support it. These gunslingers of the line of Arthur Eld, the first great champion of ka, produce a type of energy that feeds the six Beams crisscrossing Roland’s reality, intersecting at the Tower. Once there were Great Old Ones who ruled and knew magic, but the magic of creation eventually retreated everywhere except at the Tower. The Old Ones panicked, not realizing that the magic was sufficient to keep the Tower forever, and replaced it with technology. Magic relied on faith; technology did not. However, things created by technology are doomed to fail, though they may last for millennia. This includes the Beams, which run on technology.
The world has moved on, people say. It’s running down like the clock spring in an ancient watch. Time is soft, slipping in and out of gear. Some days seem forty hours long. The night Roland told the story of Mejis felt even longer. On some afternoons, night seems to rush over the horizon. The points of the compass can no longer be trusted. What was dead west today might be southwest tomorrow.
The gunslingers in Gilead, in the barony of New Canaan in In-World, are benign rulers, but their primary destiny makes them aloof. The Affiliation of Baronies that comprises their universe frays at the edges because the people who live in the distant lands—Mejis, for example—don’t feel their influence. These people pay tribute—and taxes, presumably—to Gilead, but it’s like the Roman Empire, collapsing under its own weight. Roland’s father, Stephen, is unwilling to exert much energy fighting the rebels and insurrectionists who challenge his authority because he believes the rebellion is unimportant in the grander scheme.
To succeed Roland must overcome the flawed notion that everything is unimportant except for the Tower’s well-being because everything, in some small way, contributes to the Tower’s well-being. Stephen Deschain doesn’t understand that the rebellion is an indirect threat to the Tower. As the uprising expands and finds sympathy even among people within the ivory tower of Gilead, the gunslingers are outnumbered and ultimately destroyed.
The master Trickster behind it all is Walter o’Dim, who works on behalf of the Crimson King, a fallen dark angel who has turned away from the line of Eld. The Crimson King’s goal is to bring about the downfall of the Tower and rule the resulting discord. No one knows why the Crimson King believes he can survive the Tower’s fall. Someone promised it to him or he promised it to himself, deluding himself into thinking he is beyond ka.
The Crimson King rarely acts directly, but rather enlists minions in his own world and others. He knows what destiny holds for him and tries to intervene, though not always successfully, to guarantee triumph. He sent Ed Deepneau to kill Patrick Danville, knowing that the boy would grow up to become the talented artist who would pose a threat to him. He tried to terrorize Stephen King as a young boy to prevent him from writing the Dark Tower. If King doesn’t create Roland and his fellow gunslingers and guide them along the path toward the Tower, the Crimson King would be unopposed.
Walter o’Dim is the adversary Roland fences with over his millennium-long existence. As Marten the enchanter, he is counselor to the gunslingers of Gilead, causing discord from within. He corrupts Roland’s mother so thoroughly that she is prepared to murder her husband. Marten goads Roland into taking his test of manhood early by flagrantly displaying his mother’s infidelity, the first of many times when he underestimates Roland. As John Farson, he leads the insurrection against Gilead. In this he is successful—the gunslingers win some battles but lose the war. In the end, only Roland survives of all the people in Gilead and In-World. The gunslingers of his father’s generation and of his own are all killed. The castles of Gilead are abandoned to nests of Slow Mutants and other corrupt beings.
Roland is called to save the Dark Tower via his vision in the “grapefruit” he and his friends acquire in Mejis. While some heroes must be convinced to take on the burden of a quest24—Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant is probably the most extreme case—Roland doesn’t hesitate. He likely doesn’t realize how his goal will ultimately split into two facets—personal and universal—but his answer to the call to adventure is a resounding yes, even though it means abandoning the love of his life. His goal, as in all quests, is to return the ordinary world to its former balance.
How Roland ends up on Walter’s trail and why he thinks the man in black can help him is never revealed. Their duel continues for years beyond telling. They seem incapable of killing each other; Roland’s Mid-World bullets are useless against Walter.
Walter allows Roland to catch up with him after their passage through the mountains, after circling around to meet Father Callahan and returning to the trail, but he is genuinely afraid Roland might kill him during their encounter. Roland is a wild card, an agent of Purpose who sometimes acts like he is governed by Random. Though most people think he is unimaginative, he often comes up with surprisingly original solutions to problems.
Walter fulfills many of the archetypes associated with quests. He’s the threshold guardian whose challenges Roland must pass to begin his real journey. He’s the herald, laying out important details of the upcoming mission, and
the shadow, representing Roland’s darkest desires. He’s the trickster, using laughter and ridicule to make Roland inspect his own motives and disrupting the quest whenever possible. He’s also the shape-shifter, hiding behind several masks while attempting to thwart Roland. He’s even something of a mentor, though much of what he says cannot be trusted.
Walter can’t kill Roland in the Golgotha because the Crimson King needs him to beget Mordred, the son who the Crimson King would corrupt and who, like his Arthurian namesake, would hate his White father his entire life. As a descendant of the line of Eld, he could free his Red father from the prison the Tower has become for him.
For all the parts he plays, Walter is little more than the Crimson King’s flunky. Higher powers are involved in Roland’s quest. Walter tells him in the Golgotha, “Someone has taken an interest in you.” The force that is manipulating destiny wants Roland and his followers to succeed. Roland never learns who this external power is. Perhaps it is the sheer will of the universes to survive, a Gaia that denies chaos. Maybe the Great Old Ones survive, looking down like Olympian gods, toying with the lives of mortals, aiding them when it suits their will, thwarting them otherwise.
All things serve the Beam, even the man in black. “I am compelled to tell you, partly because of the sacrifice of the boy, and partly because it is the law; the natural law of things. Water must run downhill, and you must be told.” [DT1] Everything conspires to aid Roland. Even the Little Sisters of Eluria serve the Beam, Jack Sawyer is told.
Ka is King’s great invention, a powerful and nearly irresistible force that guides Roland’s quest from the beginning. He is gifted with an intuition of what is to come and the right thing to do when it happens. He grows to rely on ka. When he needs something, he knows it will be provided . . . because he needs it. If his group tries to go against ka, ka will shepherd them back on course. If ka wants them to go through Lud and they start to go around it, circumstances will force them back. Ka’s only rule is “Stand aside and let me work.” [DT6] It has no heart or mind. According to Parkus, “ka is a friend to evil as well as to good. It embraces both.” [BH] Ka is like a Path of the Beam—it’s the way to the Tower. It isn’t omnipotent, though. Ka can be fought and changed, but only at a great cost.
“In matters of the Tower, fate became a thing as merciful as the lighter that had saved his life and as painful as the fire the miracle had ignited. Like the wheels of the oncoming train, it followed a course both logical and crushingly brutal, a course against which only steel and sweetness could stand.” [DT2]
Some purpose—or perhaps Purpose, as defined in Insomnia—is on Roland’s side. In Black House, the narrators comment that an event was “too meaningless to be called a coincidence. Coincidence brings together two previously unrelated elements of a larger story. Here nothing connected and there was no larger story.” [BH]
Coincidence becomes an active participant in the Dark Tower series, a character unto itself. Each fluke is another click in some great turning cog. Everything is happening for a reason. Eddie starts carving a key without knowing what it is for so it will be ready when he needs it. Twice Roland encounters useful people in the mercantile store in Maine.
Jack Mort, little more than a bit player, is responsible for life-shaping events in the lives of both Jake and Susannah. He dropped the brick on Susannah that gave rise to her split personality, and pushed her in front of the train twenty years later without realizing she was the same person. He also pushed Jake in front of a car driven by Enrico Balazar, the crime lord who sent Eddie to the Bahamas to buy drugs.
When Roland hears that Jake and Susannah both know the poem about the turtle he learned when he was a child, he says, “It’s another connection, one that really tells us something, although I’m not sure it’s anything we need to know. . . . Still, one never knows when a little understanding may come in handy.” Roland is aware of ka’s goal, though he may not always understand the minutiae of its day-to-day operations.
Some force that knew whom Roland would need to complete his quest provided the doorways through which he draws his ka-tet. They are very specific doorways, targeted on precise people, and only Roland can open them. On the beach, he intuitively heads north toward them without knowing they exist. Without them and the people they bring into his life, not only would Roland have failed in his quest but he would have died from infection.
There are Towers everywhere. When Balazar’s lieutenant, Jack Andolini, takes Eddie to their headquarters, they pull up in front of a restaurant called The Leaning Tower. Balazar, known for building houses of cards, was once observed building a tower nine levels high before it collapsed. The man who witnessed this felt that the tower of cards “explained the stars.” Jake passes Tower Records after he leaves the Manhattan bookshop owned by Calvin Tower, the guardian of the rose, which is the Tower’s representation in New York.
Susannah had a college teacher who hated the sort of easy coincidences often found in Dickens novels. Roland responds that her teacher was a man who either didn’t know about ka or didn’t believe in it.
Is Stephen King the force of ka? When he enters the Dark Tower as a character, this notion becomes a distinct possibility. No one wants Roland to succeed more than the author. He spent the entire span of his publishing career pushing the ka-tet along the Path of the Beam toward the Tower. But King denies that he is ka; instead he is just another of its instruments. “And still ka comes to me, comes from me, I translate it, am made to translate it, ka flows out of my navel like a ribbon. I am not ka, I am not the ribbon, it’s just what comes through me.” [DT6]
Ka isn’t always a kind mistress. It is an enormous wheel with more momentum than most people can oppose. It’s the answer to every hateful question. “Why must life always demand so much and give so little? Ka.” [BH] When its translator grows lazy and decides to abandon Roland’s story, ka loses patience with him and orchestrates his death.
In 438 B.C., Alcestis wrote, “I have found power in the mysteries of thought / exaltation in the changing of the Muses; / I have been versed in the reasonings of men; / But Fate is stronger than anything I have known.”
Ka is Roland’s usual answer to why things are the way they are, and his reliance upon it as a panacea often frustrates his friends.
There was one thing about ka they didn’t tell us, [Ralph] thought. It’s slippery. Slippery as some nasty old fish that won’t come off the hook but just keeps flopping around in your hand. And it was like climbing a sand dune, too—you slid one step back for every two you managed to lunge ahead. . . . Because ka was like a fish, ka was like a sand dune, ka was like a wheel that didn’t want to stop but only roll on and on, crushing whatever might happen to be in its path. A wheel of many spokes. But most of all perhaps, ka was like a ring. Like a wedding ring. Life is a wheel. Sooner or later everything you thought you’d left behind comes around again. For good or ill, it comes around again. [INS]
Eddie is the character most frustrated by greedy old ka. He comes to refer to it as “ka-ka.” It’s the net from which none ever escaped, and he is struck by the way things from his world are bleeding over into Roland’s. Things in Mid-World are tangible, but on one level they don’t seem real to him.
Why do people over here sing “Hey Jude?” I don’t know. That cyborg bear, Shardik. . . all that shit about the Wizard of Oz, Roland—all that happened to us. I have no doubt of it, but at the same time it doesn’t seem real to me. . . . And what happens after the Green Palace? Why, we walk into the woods, just like Hansel and Gretel. There’s a road for us to walk on. Muffin-balls for us to pick. Civilization has ended. Everything is coming unraveled. You told us so. We saw it in Lud. Except guess what? It’s not. . . . The joke is that, out here a billion miles from nowhere, we come upon a storybook town. Civilized. Decent. The kind of folks you feel you know . . . The storybook town has a fairy-tale problem. And so the storybook people call on a band of movie-show heroes to save them from the fairy-tale villains. I know it’s
real—people are going to die, very likely, and the blood will be real, the screams will be real—but at the same time there’s something about it that feels no more real than stage scenery. [New York feels] the same. . . . Out of all the hoods in New York, Balazar shows up. [DT5]
Another take on ka and the sense of omniscience it lends to the characters is the cyclical nature of Roland’s existence. Eddie comes close to realizing this at one point, commenting that the way he intuitively knows how to ride a horse and how quickly he learned to shoot is like stories of reincarnation. If Roland has been repeating his life over and over again, then Eddie, Jake, Susannah and Oy have likely done so, too. Have they learned from their past experiences and gotten better each time? It’s like a computer adventure game. Sometimes a mistake made early on doesn’t manifest itself until far later, and the player has to go back to the beginning and try again.25
King draws from Hindu mythology throughout the series. The god Vishnu took the form of a turtle called Kurma to carry the world on his back after a huge flood. In The Dark Tower, the turtle “sees the truth but mayn’t aid.” In other books King uses the turtle to symbolize a guardian of the universe, though in It the turtle was old and mostly impotent. Pennywise even suggested the turtle was dead. King compares the red dot on the low men’s foreheads to Hindu caste marks, and identifies Gan—perhaps incorrectly—as a Hindu creation.
Within the pages of the final two Dark Tower books, King reveals some trivia about his inspirations for other elements in the series. The town of Calla Bryn Sturgis was named for The Magnificent Seven director, John Sturges, and the film’s star Yul Brynner. However, King realized that he had misspelled the director’s last name after the prologue had been posted—published, in a sense—on his official Web site.