The Dark Tower

“Foolhardy or not, Roland was fiercely proud of Jake. He saw the boy had established canda between himself and Callahan: that distance […] which assures that a pair of outnumbered gunslingers cannot be killed by a single shot.”

In the first book of the Dark Tower series, Roland sacrificed Jake in the name of his quest. Now, they have developed the bond of a father and son, and Roland takes pride in how Jake acquits himself while in danger. Jake has become a gunslinger; to Roland, this is the greatest gift that he can bestow on his adopted son.

“Mordred too was a twin, a Jekyll-and-Hyde creature with two selves, and he—or it—had the faces of two fathers to remember.”

As the son of two fathers—one good and one evil—Mordred embodies duality, including The Duality of the Cosmos. The language of this passage, including the allusion to Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the contrasting pronouns “he” and “it,” suggests this duality; Mordred exists at the intersection of good and evil, human and animal. His two selves cause tension in his mind from his first waking moments, suggesting that there was never a possibility that this tension would result in anything other than anger and violence. The gunslingers warn one another not to forget the face of their respective fathers, yet for Mordred, this act just underscores the liminal nature of his existence.

“It couldn’t be real, it was a cartoon, for God’s sake!”

Jake is just a boy, but his quest with Roland has forced him to grow up fast. He is torn between wanting to seem more mature and acknowledging his true feelings. To be scared of a cartoon, Jake tells himself, is childish, yet the danger of the cartoon dinosaurs is very real. Jake’s desire to prematurely put his childhood behind him puts him in more danger by compelling him to ignore real threats for fear of seeming childish.

“He was not from this world, not anymore, and it was a relief to give up the pretense.”

Eddie finally explicitly accepts that the Real World is not his home. He was never happy or at home in the Real World, so he embraces his outsider status. He may be Eddie from New York, but his time in other worlds is where he has truly become himself—an idea reinforced in the moments of his death, when he affirms his bond with Roland, who set him on this path.

“I think I may have come to the end of the path, [Walter] thought as he saw the spider strutting toward him on its seven legs, a bloated, lively thing.”

Mordred is established as a credible threat to Roland when he kills Walter, Roland’s longstanding nemesis. The man in black, who caused Roland so much pain and whom Walter has spent so much time pursuing, dies at the hands of a newborn. The language of the passage also underscores Mordred’s duality; the personification of the “strutting” spider suggests Mordred’s human side, while the description of his form as simultaneously “bloated” and “lively” is a near oxymoron.

“Tracks (eternally halted trains sat on some of them) radiated out like strands of a steel spiderweb.”

In The Dark Tower, spiders and their webs are associated with darkness and evil. Mordred, for instance, announced himself to the world by devouring his own mother and is currently sleeping in a spider’s web of his own creation. Trains, too, have negative connotations: The ka-tet’s previous experience with a train was a murderous, sentient monorail called Blaine. As a result, the image of a network of trains arranged in a spider’s web is an ominous sign of what is to come in Devar-Toi.

“It was the environment, of course; death baking out of the very rocks and earth that surrounded them.”

The hostile, desolate desert is both a literal and figurative demonstration of the malign influence of the Crimson King seeping into the world and turning it into something poisonous. Rather than reflecting the characters’ emotional states, the environment actively corrodes and poisons them.

“A feeling both blue and strange crept among the gunslingers after Brautigan and his friends left, but at first no one spoke of it. Each of them thought that melancholy belonged to him or her alone.”

Being trained as gunslingers by Roland has given the ka-tet both talents and relationships that are far more meaningful than anything they experienced in their previous lives. As ka gives, it also takes away, however. Their melancholy reflects their training, which allows them to sense that one of them will soon die. The same force that has given them so much also curses them with the knowledge that their bond is soon to be broken, which their isolation in their grief prefigures.

“He liked it. He thought of all the times he’d promised himself he wouldn’t smoke like his father did—never in life—and now here he was, starting the habit. And with his new father’s agreement, if not approval.”

Jake’s relationship with his biological father was never particularly affectionate, yet it seemed important to Jake. The longer he has been away, however, the more that relationship has faded in significance. Now, he does not care much about distancing himself from his actual father; he cares about imitating his adoptive father, Roland. Jake takes up smoking to be more like Roland in the hope that the act will help him bear the burden of grief associated with Eddie’s death.

“‘Turn around,’ said the voice of the man who had turned Chip’s world turtle on That Day, the man who’d almost gotten him killed (he’d been in the hospital over in Bridgton for two weeks, by the living Jesus) and had now reappeared like an old monster from some child’s closet.”

McAvoy’s point of view provides the audience with the opportunity to see Roland from the perspective of a “regular” person. Within the secondary world of the Dark Tower series, Roland’s actions are broadly legible in archetypically heroic terms. Removed from this high-stakes, good-versus-evil backdrop and transplanted in mundane reality, however, Roland reads not as a hero but a terrifying monster. While this moment largely functions as comic relief, it hints that the morality underpinning the novel is not as cut-and-dried as it might appear.

“During the long years he had spent on the trail of the man in black, the gunslinger would have sworn nothing in the universe could have caused him to renounce the Tower; had he not literally killed his own mother in pursuit of it, back at the start of his terrible career?”

This passage highlights Roland’s character development: It is not simply that Roland has changed over the course of his quest but that he has become aware of this change. The quest for the Tower was once all-consuming, but now, Roland realizes, there is something more substantial to his existence. Roland’s growing self-awareness undermines the steel-edged determination that has driven him forward for so long. Now, so close to his goal, he begins to wonder about the cost of completing his quest. The implicit parallel between Roland and Mordred, who similarly killed his mother, underscores Roland’s self-scrutiny, suggesting that the two are not as different as Roland would like to believe.

“You didn’t lose it, you turned your coward’s eye away. My friend had to save you for you to see it again.”

Stephen King appears as a character in his own work, only for his protagonist to criticize him in the strongest possible terms. Roland, a man of duty and honor, has tried to impart these values to Jake, only for Jake to sacrifice himself in the name of what he sees as a lazy, ungrateful author who is fortunate to have lucked into importance. Roland’s stinging criticism, written by King, is an example of an author reckoning with himself in the strongest terms and develops the theme of The Role of the Creator by highlighting the author’s responsibility to his creations.

“Because until Saturday afternoon between four and five o’clock, nothing was sure. Even with the Breakers stopped, nothing was sure until Stephen King was safe.”

Roland’s visit to the Tet Corporation follows the sudden deaths of Eddie and Jake. The message in the lobby has clarified into a tribute to Eddie and Jake but could only do so once King was saved. The changing message is a relief to Roland, showing him that he is having an effect on the universe and showing him that his friends’ deaths were not in vain. The pain is real, as is their sacrifice.

“[I]t was so odd for Jake to die like that. Jake is in all his notes, and no surprise there, because Jake was supposed to be around until the very end.”

In the Dark Tower universe, King is a powerful figure, but he is not akin to an omniscient creator god. Rather, he is a vessel through which more powerful forces operate. He is surprised by his own writing because he is channeling ka from another world rather than inventing anything himself. The passage also serves as a metafictional commentary on the writing process, with King observing how stories may evolve beyond their creators’ original visions.

“We go to seek a better world. May you find one, as well.”

Ted’s final message to Roland and Susannah is a relinquishment of agency. As one of the Breakers, he has played an active part in the destruction of the Beams. As a rebel, he has played a part in saving a Beam. As he swore when he killed a man with his mind-spear, he does not want to use his powers to change the world. Instead, he wants to find a better world, finding peace by surrendering his agency over a life that has caused—he believes—so much harm.

“The wind seemed to grow ever sharper as they trudged below the milky swirls of cloud moving along the Path of the Beam.”

Susannah and Roland walk the Path of the Beam, accepting the guidance of ka. Though they are following the road that they believe to be good, they find themselves enveloped in bitter cold and harried by sharp winds. The Path of the Beam may be the “right” way to go, but that does not mean that they will not suffer. Rather, they must suffer to save the Beam and to reach the Tower; in The Dark Tower, as well as the series as a whole, the pursuit of what is good often requires sacrifice.

“The wood simply refused to burn.”

In the land of the Crimson King, the world itself is inhospitable to Roland and Susanah. The malign influence of the departed king has seeped into everything, including the wood. The personification of the wood, which spitefully “refuses” to provide warmth to those who need it, underscores the relationship between king and country.

“But now he’s safe from them. Has put himself beyond them. He is Un-dead.”

Throughout the series, Roland has dealt with most obstacles by using his guns. Yet the Crimson King has moved preemptively to make Roland’s greatest skill ineffective. Roland cannot simply shoot the Crimson King, who has killed himself to move beyond death. That the Crimson King has embraced death to further his goals parallels the sacrificial deaths of figures like Jake and Eddie, once again complicating the novel’s moral schema.

“Yes. This was worse. She hated knowing it, and would never admit it to anyone else, but the deep, endless cold of that last night was far worse.”

Susannah is ashamed to find that the endless cold is worse than the emotional pain resulting from the deaths of Eddie and Jake. This betrayal of the dead intensifies the terrible feeling of the cold, as she suffers the added pain of her guilt.

“It was a photograph of the Dark Tower.”

The photograph of the Dark Tower in Dandelo’s cottage strikes Roland, making everything about his quest suddenly seem more real. The Dark Tower is not an invention or an abstraction but a physical structure that can be photographed and approached—a point that the plain, declarative nature of this sentence underscores.

“He was as much an addict as Eddie had been at his worst, she reflected, only Patrick’s dope was a narrow line of graphite.”

Addiction is painfully familiar to the ka-tet. In previous novels, Eddie noticed how Roland’s obsession with the Tower was eerily similar to his own addiction to heroin. Likewise, Patrick is figuratively addicted to art and drawing, suggesting that he will fit right in with the others on the journey. The metaphor also extends the novel’s consideration of the relationship between creator and creation, suggesting that that relationship can be unhealthy and compulsive.

“He saw the face of his only son peering over the back of the abomination and then it was gone in a spray of blood as his first bullet tore it off.”

This passage dramatically inverts the gunslingers’ admonition not to forget the face of one’s father: Roland violently destroys the face of his monstrous son and, in doing so, creates a sight that he will never forget. Likewise, Mordred’s first real glimpse of his father up close is fused into his many spiders’ eyes until Roland shoots off his face.

“NOW COMES ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER!”

Roland approaches the tower, announcing his arrival with a play on the title of the poem that inspired the series: “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” The tense is switched from past to present, while the sentence begins with “now,” suggesting immediacy: Roland comes to the Dark Tower in this moment, becoming the figure that the poem alluded to many centuries earlier. The tense change also foreshadows the cyclicality of Roland’s quest; indeed, where the poem concludes with a restatement of its title (still in past tense), The Dark Tower concludes with a restatement of the first sentence of the first novel, The Gunslinger.