The Road to The Dark Tower (11 page)

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 is 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.

Also, his comrades don’t join him voluntarily; Roland hijacks them from their own worlds without considering the ethics of taking them
against their will. He needs them; therefore, they must come. This is the morality of ka.

The object he has struggled to reach with his last ounce of strength is a door, the first of many he will encounter during the months to come. The members of Roland’s ka-tet will take interdimensional doorways for granted, but this is the first such door he has ever encountered during his millennium-long journey. Though he doesn’t know it, another door recently played its part in shaping his destiny. Father Callahan was transported through one from the way station to Calla Bryn Sturgis shortly after Roland left with Jake.

The Power of Four

Including Roland, the ka-tet of the
Dark Tower
is composed of four people. King often assembles groups of four: Roland’s youthful ka-tet consisted of himself, Alain, Cuthbert and Jamie. Gran-Pere Jaffords and three others, including Molly Doolin, stood against the Wolves the first time one was killed. Three others accompanied Arthur Eld when he slew Saita, the great snake. Stu, Larry, Ralph and Glen are sent to Las Vegas at the end of
The Stand,
four friends go hunting in
Dreamcatcher,
four boys wander abroad in
The Body
and the four-membered Sawyer Gang enters the Black House. In a vision caused by the rose, Eddie sees four men save a young boy from a monster with one eye, reminiscent of the Sawyer Gang saving Ty Marshall from Mr. Munshun.