The Road to The Dark Tower (7 page)

Ultimately, even King recognized
The Gunslinger
as a stumbling block to some seeking entry into Roland’s universe. “I had a lot of pretentious ideas about how stories were supposed to be told,” he said.
¹⁰
In the new foreword, he confesses to “apologizing for it, telling people that if they persisted they would find the story really found its voice” in the next book. While editing the last three books in the series, he took a break and revised
The Gunslinger
completely. When asked if someone who had already read the original version would want to get the new edition, King said, “I guess if you were a completist you would, but otherwise maybe no.”
¹¹

“The beginning was out of sync with the ending.” He felt he owed it to the potential reader and to himself to go back and put things in order. “The idea was to bring
The Gunslinger
in line with the material in the new books as well as the material in the first four. The other thing I wanted to do was to rewrite to some degree for language because I always felt it had a different feel than the other books because I was so young when I wrote it. The material is about an additional 10% (about 35 manuscript pages) with changes on almost every page.”
¹²
The increased length amounts to about nine thousand words,
¹³
but not all of the changes are additions. King deleted some passages nearly a half page in length.

Director Mick Garris compares the first night of his miniseries
The Shining
to winding up a clock. Not much of consequence happens, but the characters are developed and fleshed out and hints of what has been and what is to come are carefully established.
The Gunslinger
is similar—it sets the stage and the mood for what will follow. However, Roland’s universe is winding down rather than up. “The dark days have come; the last of the lights are guttering, flickering out—in the minds of men as well as in their dwellings. The world has moved on. Something has, perhaps, happened to the continuum itself.”
¹⁴

Guided by ka, the mysterious force shepherding him toward success, the gunslinger uses people and discards them after they’ve served their purpose or if they stand in the way of his goal. In the abstract, his actions are understandable. Saving all of existence is surely worth sacrificing a few people.

The opening section, “The Gunslinger,” covers a period of nearly two months, taking the as-yet-unnamed gunslinger
¹⁵
from Pricetown through Tull and southeast
¹⁶
into the desert, where he encounters Brown, a young hermit who owns a precocious talking raven named Zoltan.
¹⁷

However, King begins the story five days after Roland departs from Brown’s hut. He experiences a brief spell of dizziness because he has just been returned to the desert after reaching the Tower and found lacking, though his awareness of this fades from his mind quickly. Through a series of flashbacks, he reminisces about his recent history. Readers don’t know his greater purpose or origin, only that he has been pursuing the man in black across the desert for some time. What the gunslinger wants and why the man in black is fleeing remain a mystery.

In
Song of Susannah,
King says he liked how the story seems to be going backward, starting with Roland, slipping back to Brown, then to Tull and finally to show Nort the Weedeater being resurrected by Walter. “The early part of it was all told in reverse gear.” [DT6]

The gunslinger’s sole companion is a moribund mule that he bought in Pricetown before reaching Tull. The arduous desert journey has drained the animal to the point where the gunslinger can no longer ride it. This isn’t the first beast of burden he’s ridden into the ground. In the opening paragraphs of “The Little Sisters of Eluria,” which takes place many years earlier, Roland’s horse, Topsy, is on its last legs as well.

The gunslinger estimates how far behind the man in black he is by the freshness of Walter’s fires, analogous to Tuco from
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,
who chased the man with no name across the desert. From Brown’s vague estimate, the gunslinger believes he is gradually catching up but is still several weeks behind. Desperate for companionship, the gunslinger waits for Brown to question him; he has a need to confess. The events of Tull rest heavily on his heart and mind. Though he can be cold and calculating, ruthless in the pursuit of his goal, the gunslinger isn’t heartless. Sometimes he shocks even himself.

“Do you believe in the afterlife?” he asks Brown. “I think this is it,” the young man replies. It’s a perceptive comment, because Roland has probably visited Brown countless times before, having returned to the desert after reaching the end of his life. There is no clearing at the end of the path for him, but he is reborn via the Dark Tower, the Hall of Resumption.

Tull is dead, he tells Brown, daring the young man to ask more. Like a vampire, he needs an invitation to cross the threshold and tell his tale. Brown finally asks.

A tiny blot on an ugly countryside, Tull is a few short side streets crossing the main road at the bottom of a shallow hollow. The stagecoaches Roland met heading away from town are occupied, but the ones that pass him on the way to Tull are mostly empty. No one but the gunslinger comes here anymore. It’s a borderland with far less life than Calla Bryn Sturgis.

His greeting in Tull is “Hey Jude.” The gunslinger knows the piano player, Sheb, from Mejis, but only in the expanded version do they acknowledge their common past.

At the saloon, the gunslinger meets a dead man, Nort the Weedeater, poisoned from chewing devil grass and reanimated by the man in black.
¹⁸

I See You, Lad

One of the first indications that there is some relationship between Roland’s world and our own comes when the gunslinger hears Sheb playing “Hey Jude” as he enters Tull. The song appears several more times over the course of the series. Eddie sings it on the beach at the Western Sea. Roland and Susan Delgado hear it the night they meet in Mejis. It plays from the speakers at Blue Heaven, and Stutterin’ Bill the robot plays it on a CD when he transports Susannah, Roland, Patrick and Oy to the Federal Outpost.

In Mid-World, the song begins “Hey Jude, I see you, lad.”

Nort is one of many traps left behind for the gunslinger by the man in black, whose name is revealed to be Walter o’Dim in the revised edition. Walter would likely be disappointed if his traps worked, but he sets them all the same. For the man in black, this pursuit is a game. He can run circles around the gunslinger, but Roland must chase, so the man in black must allow himself to be chased.

Nort speaks the High Speech, an ancient, dead language that the gunslinger hasn’t heard in centuries, perhaps even millennia, since his days in Gilead. This is the first hint of the gunslinger’s age and the malleability of time in his world. Whether Nort is as old as Roland—like Sheb—or if he learned the High Speech from Walter or while dead is unclear.

The gunslinger knows that stopping in Tull will make him lose ground on the man in black, but he seems unable to resist its allure, like Odysseus trapped on Calypso’s island in
The Odyssey
. He befriends Allie, the bartender, and spends a week in her bed. He is a ship becalmed, wanting to continue his quest but unable to catch a wind in his sails.

Allie provides him with a clue that, had he understood it, might have pointed him in the direction of the Tower. The clouds near Tull all flow in the same direction, southeast across the desert.
¹⁹
Roland and Walter aren’t on a Path of the Beam, but they aren’t far away from one. The Beam is pulling them gently in the right direction, though Roland and, presumably, Walter aren’t conscious of it.

After five days, he learns of Sylvia Pittston, a corpulent preacher who believes she is carrying the Crimson King’s child.
²⁰
She’s yet another person who dates back to Roland’s days in Mejis—she traveled through that distant barony a year before he and his friends arrived. She springs another trap, preaching words Walter supplied to her. Calling the gunslinger the Interloper, she raises the town against him. Roland has no choice but to shoot the entire population. He reloads on the fly, a skill it took him years
²¹
to learn, burning his fingers on the hot chambers. As he shoots, he screams.

Allie is the first to die, begging Roland to kill her because she fell for the man in black’s trap and used the magic word he left her in a note that would get Nort to tell what he experienced in the afterlife. In the chronology of the
Dark Tower
novels—though not in the gunslinger’s life—she is the first of those he cared for to die by his hands. The first sacrificial lamb.

By the end of his shooting spree, fifty-eight men, women and children lie dead in the dusty streets. The gunslinger’s only act of mercy before leaving Tull is to cut Nort down from where Sylvia Pittston and her followers had crucified him, laying his body with those of his townspeople. This is reminiscent of Odysseus, who backtracks on his journey home to tend to the body of one of his fallen comrades on Circe’s island. Respect for the bodies of the dead is an important part of classic and heroic fiction. Roland muses that, unlike Nort, the other townspeople will only have to die once.

The gunslinger finishes his story and spends the night at Brown’s hut. After two more weeks of travel across the desert, delirious and dehydrated, he approaches a way station for the coach line. He sees someone sitting in the inn’s shadow. Mistaking the figure for the man in black, and in spite of his weakened condition, he runs the last quarter mile, gun drawn, making no effort to hide. Not that there’s anything to hide behind. When Roland finally nears the Tower, a similar urge to drop everything and run pell-mell for his goal sweeps over him, but then he will have Patrick Danville and the loaded cart to hold him back.

Once he realizes the figure is a young boy, he has only enough presence of mind left to reholster his gun before collapsing. Jake Chambers has water and food ready for him when he awakens. Later, when Roland rescues Jake from the Tick-Tock Man in Lud, the first thing he does is provide water to slake Jake’s thirst. He remembers this moment and marvels at the role reversal. Sharing khef is an important ritual. Before the battle of Devar-Toi, Roland performs this ceremony with his ka-tet for the last time.

Jake says that the man in black—“the priest”—passed by sometime within the past two weeks, though his concept of time is unreliable. Jake hid, afraid the bypasser might be a ghost. Roland correctly assumes Walter knew Jake was there but left him as another trap. Roland can’t linger long at the way station. Neither can he leave the boy behind.

The boy doesn’t remember how he got to the way station. “I knew when I came here, but it’s all fuzzy now, like a bad dream when you wake up.” He vaguely remembers his home city, the Statue of Liberty and his school uniform.

The gunslinger hypnotizes Jake to learn more—a skill he acquired, ironically, from Marten, who is another guise of the man in black. While performing his dancing bullet trick, he muses about the nature of evil in his world and, for the first time, mentions the Dark Tower. “The gunslinger’s goal is not this half-human creature but the Dark Tower; the man in black—and, more specifically, what the man in black knows—is his first step on his road to that mysterious place.” [DT2, argument]

Jake reveals enough about his upbringing for the gunslinger to see similarities with his own. Through Jake, the gunslinger learns of New York City, a place that will play a pivotal role in his quest. All his life he accepted intellectually the idea of multiple worlds, but until now—and perhaps even now—he doesn’t believe such a place as New York could exist. “If so, it had only existed in the myth of prehistory.”
²²

Roland has been far beyond the world he knew for a long time and often encounters things he once thought were fictional. As a boy, he and his friends believed the Dark Tower didn’t exist except as a symbol. When he encounters a guardian of the Beam, he is again surprised to find myth become reality. He even wonders if Mid-World—as opposed to In-World, where Gilead was, and the desert borderland—is anything more than a rumor.

Ultimately, Jake remembers his death. Someone who resembles the man in black pushed him in front of a car. Roland later learns the pusher was Jack Mort, but Walter was likely nearby, orchestrating. Before bringing him out of his trance, the gunslinger asks Jake if he wants to remember his final moments or not. Jake chooses to forget.

While in the inn’s cellar looking for food, Roland hears a groaning sound and sees a hole forming in the foundation. From the other side, a Speaking Demon tells him, “While you travel with the boy, the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket.” Digging to get at the source of the voice, Roland finds only a rotting jawbone so large that he believes it belonged to one of the Great Old Ones, one of the creators.
²³
For no clear reason, he takes the bone with him when he clambers out of the cellar. “It occurred to him later that this was when he began to love the boy—which was, of course, what the man in black must have planned all along.”

King makes no secret of the fact that Jake’s future is grim. Before long, the gunslinger thinks of him as “the sacrifice.”
²⁴
Roland and the boy he will one day come to think of as his son, the makings of a ka-tet that won’t be complete until the middle of
The Waste Lands,
set out toward the mountains. Unbeknownst to them—and to readers until
Wolves of the Calla
—as they leave the way station behind, a figure who will play a significant role in Roland’s future—Father Callahan from
’Salem’s Lot
—is drawn through from Earth in much the same manner as Jake was.