The Road to The Dark Tower (36 page)

By the end of his quest, he knows how to love again.

Though the members of his ka-tet have little doubt that he would sacrifice any of them if he deemed it necessary, letting Jake fall beneath the mountains is the last conscious sacrifice Roland makes. Others in the ka-tet die during the quest, but it is now
their
quest, too, and the decision to risk their lives is their own, not Roland’s.

He has also learned the blessing of mercy. He released people who did him or others wrong—Slightman in the Calla and the minders in Devar-Toi, for example, people he would once have gunned down without a second thought. He even promises to let Mordred go free in exchange for Oy’s life.

“You’re the one who never changes,” Cort told him once. “It’ll be your damnation, boy. You’ll wear out a hundred pairs of boots on your walk to hell.” As the philosopher George Santayana is often quoted, those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it—a saying Roland knew from his teacher Vannay.

This time, perhaps it will be different. His bag now contains the ancient brass horn that legend claimed had once been blown by Arthur Eld, lost at Jericho Hill in his previous life. Roland has a strange awareness of the horn, as if he’d never touched it before. The voice of the Tower tells him it is a sigul of hope, that some day he may find rest, perhaps even salvation.

The book ends as the series began more than thirty years earlier. “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”

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.

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]