The Road to The Dark Tower (54 page)

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
Bryn
ner. 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.

He also wonders if he misspelled the name of the vampiric man Roland and Susannah encounter at the beginning of Tower Road. Dandelo is a reference to the family cat who was the subject of the researcher’s first, failed attempt at teleportation in the Vincent Price version of the movie
The Fly,
based on a story by George Langlahan. King probably had teleportation on his mind after assigning that power to Sheemie Ruiz.

King borrowed from many other sources in creating his magnum opus—Tolkien, spaghetti westerns,
The Wizard of Oz,
T. S. Eliot,
The Lord of the Rings,
the Harry Potter books,
Don Quixote,
Edgar Allan Poe,
Thomas Wolfe,
Romeo and Juliet,
and Greek mythology. From these diverse influences he has created something unique. Edward Bryant says, “[I]t’s strangely unfamiliar, dissimilar to anything else the author is doing. And if the imagination itself can be considered a bone that supports the musculature, flesh, and hide of a writer’s private associative creative processes, then I suspect this work of King’s cuts close to it.”
²⁶

In the end, it is not clear whether to call Roland a tragic or a dramatic hero. He successfully completes the task to which he was destined, though he left many companions strewn behind him, but so did Odysseus. Although he undergoes a kind of resurrection, he fails his personal quest. King provides readers with a glimmer of hope that the last gunslinger is evolving and one day may understand ka’s message, complete his transformation and climb to the top of the Tower, mounting each level in groups of nineteen steps, and find . . . what? The destiny that Robert Browning left to the imagination of his readers?

Or maybe he will come to understand that his personal quest is too costly in terms of the sacrifices it requires of him. Perhaps he will decide that saving the world is enough purpose for one man and that the real way for him to discover the truth of creation is to live out the rest of his natural days without ever completing the road to the Dark Tower.

¹
Robert Browning, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” stanza XXXI.

²
“On Being Nineteen (and a Few Other Things),” Viking, 2003.

³
Ibid.

⁴
Edward Bryant,
Locus
magazine, vol. 27, no. 6, December 1991.

⁵
A reference to
The Lord of the Rings,
analogous to Avalon in Arthurian legends.

⁶
Interview with Janet C. Beaulieu of the
Bangor Daily News,
November 17, 1988.

⁷
“The Politics of Limited Editions,” part 1,
Castle Rock Newsletter,
vol. 1, no. 6, June 1995.

⁸
Interview with Janet C. Beaulieu, op cit.

⁹
King Lear,
Act III, Scene IV, 178–80.

¹⁰
Robert Browning,
Selected Poetry,
The Penguin Poetry Library, edited by Daniel Karlin, Penguin Books, 1989. Synopsis derived from
The Book of Knowledge, The Children’s Encyclopedia,
Grolier, 1923.

¹¹
Browning reportedly had in his drawing room a tapestry featuring an emaciated horse. Jim Rockhill, “The Weird Review: Childe Roland,”
www.violetbooks.com/REVIEWS/rockhill-browning.html
.

¹²
Ibid.

¹³
Browning perpetuates a mistake in using this term that dates to “The Battle of Hastings” by poet Thomas Chatteton (1752–1770). Though intended to refer to a trumpet, the word is actually the etymological root of “slogan,” or battle cry. Robert Browning,
Selected Poetry,
The Penguin Poetry Library, op cit.

¹⁴
Robert Browning: A Collection of Critical Essays,
Harold Bloom and Adrienne Munich, eds. Prentice Hall, Inc. 1977.

¹⁵
The Norton Anthology of World Literature,
Second Edition, Volume B, W. W. Norton & Company, 2002.

¹⁶
This was often done to convert the gestes into triumphs of Christianity, of which Charlemagne was a champion.

¹⁷
Though this is often seen as pride on Roland’s part, it may also have been an act of loyalty. The rear guard’s duty was to protect the main army from attack from behind, and to call the army back into battle might have led to their destruction. Roland had sworn an oath to Charlemagne to fight to the death to protect the army.

¹⁸
Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature,
Merriam-Webster, Incorporated, 1995, and
The Columbia Encyclopedia,
Sixth Edition, Columbia University Press, 2001.

¹⁹
Beezer, one of the Thunder Five in
Black House,
was a fan of C. S. Lewis.

²⁰
The author of a book called
The C. S. Lewis Hoax
claimed that
The Dark Tower
wasn’t by Lewis, but a forensic documents expert confirmed that the work was indeed his.

²¹
The story features Dr. Elwin Ransom and the skeptical MacPhee, from Lewis’s
Out of the Silent Planet
.
The Dark Tower
may have been intended as part of his science fiction series.

²²
Louis MacNeice,
The Dark Tower,
Faber and Faber Limited, London, 1947.

²³
A possible logical problem crops up here. If Mid-World people vacationed in New York in 2001, shouldn’t that have prevented the ka-tet from going to a previous time? Though they never get to test this theory, the ka-tet believes that if any one of them travels to a certain time, none of them can revisit that time. Perhaps the Mid-World Tourism Bureau only accesses worlds other than Keystone Earth.

²⁴
Jack Sawyer is reluctant to come out of retirement to assist in the serial murder case in
Black House,
for example.

²⁵
For example, in the old text adventure game based on Douglas Adams’s
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,
if a player fails to give a dog a sandwich very early in the game, the mission is doomed to failure regardless of whatever else the player does. It’s a small detail, like Roland failing to reclaim Arthur Eld’s horn at Jericho Hill, but a crucial one. The hungry dog always wins, and there’s only one chance to feed it.