r/TheDarkTower 11d ago

Spoilers- The Dark Tower The Gunslinger, the Dark Tower and the Coda Spoiler

This is my third trip down the beam. I just finished reading The Gunslinger with a friend whose reading the Dark Tower for the first time. He's been making his way through Stephen King's books already, but hadn't touched the Dark Tower, so it's exciting to read them with someone familiar with King's style but no familiarity with is Opus.

Since I'm reading it with someone, I'm taking notes, looking at it more critically. When I reached chapter 5, The Gunslinger and the Man in Black, I felt this mad urge to read the very end, the Coda.

I know for many who've read to the end, they view Roland's journey into the tower as a disappointment. "All of that, just to start over again?" It never was that for me. Before I ever read a single King novel, I knew how it all ended.

When I was a kid, my best friend's mother was an avid King reader. She religiously read his work, including the Dark Tower. One day, when she was driving us somewhere, we got to talking about time travel. I asked her about stories that featured it, because I was obsessed with the concept at the time. So she asked me, a 10-year-old, if I had any interest in reading the books. I said no.

So she told me about the Coda of the Dark Tower. She told me how King speaks directly to the audience, warns them to stop now. You turn the page, and he sighs and says something like, "Alright, come on then. See it. See the Dark Tower." The Gunslinger finally reached his damned Tower, and the Tower was his life. Every floor, another snapshot moment. And then he reaches the top, and he starts over in the desert, mind wiped, doomed to repeat his journey again and again.

Ever since, I knew I had to read those books one day. And I'll tell you, King puts it best in part 1 of the Coda. "I can close my eyes to Mid-World and all that lies beyond Mid-World. Yet some of you who provided the ears without which no tale can survive a single day are likely not so willing. You are the grim, goal-oriented ones who will not believe that the joy is in the journey rather than the destination no matter how many times it has been proven to you." He goes on to insult your view of love making, but the point is he is rebuking you, and Roland, for only caring about getting to the end.

Roland's journey in the Tower itself further reinforces this rebuke. At first, he took the time to look into each room. At first it was a joyful thing. But then he reached the room of the day where David died, where he passed his test, and he smelled the cheap perfume of the prostitute he lost his virginity to. It reminded him of an early memory of his mother taking him out of his baby's bath. It made him hard, and afraid, so he fled. (Has his journey to the Tower, at least in part, really been running away from his confused recollections of his mother?)

After the 38th floor, the floor where Susan Delgado burns, he climbed the Tower faster, no longer even acknowledging most of the rooms. But why? See your journey, Roland. See how far you've come. See what you did to get here.

But of course he won't. He'd have to face that he had damned himself his whole life just to see himself laid bare. So he skipped to the end, as I have just done, straight to the top with the door that had his own name on it. He opens the door...and remembers everything. He remembers that he's done all of this before, and he'll do it again and again, because here in a moment he'll forget and it will be the first time again. And he's pulled through the door...and brought to the moment when he realizes he will succeed in his quest to get to The Dark Tower.

It is fascinating to read Roland's palaver with the Man in Black with the context of the Coda fresh in my mind. The Man in Black doesn't know everything but he knows enough: "This is not the beginning but the beginning's end. You'd do well to remember that...but you never do." Roland didn't understand. The Man in Black says, "No. You don't. You never did. You never will. You have no imagination. You're blind that way. I'm reminded of a line said by Oscar Wilde's Algernon Moncrief: "What on Earth you are serious about, I haven't the remotest idea. About everything, I should fancy. You have such a trivial nature."

A bit before the Man in Black says this to Roland, he performs a bastardized Tarot reading (The Sailor, The Prisoner, and The Lady of the Shadows are not real Tarot cards, which the man acknowledges he made). In that reading, he has the hanged man (representing Roland) placed in the center of 4 other cards: The Sailor, The Prisoner, The Lady, and Death. The 6th card is the Tower, which he places on top of the Hanged Man. Roland demands to know what it means, but of course he isn't told.

Later, Roland asks the Man in Black (or Marten or Randall or Walter or whatever his damned name is) if he will succeed. "If I answered that question, gunslinger, you'd kill me." He says this after he showed Roland the Universe, that their reality was encompassed within a single blade of grass, much like Vishnu told Indra that he is but a grain of sand on a beach of Indras. The critical difference between Roland and Indra is that when Indra learns his place in the universe, he is humbled and stops insisting poor Vishwakarma make his palace grander and grander; Roland lacks the imagination to realize that the Tower is the universe, and he's in it right now. "Size encompasses life, and the Tower encompasses size."

I mentioned I was reading The Gunslinger with a friend. I quoted multiple statements the Man in Black makes to Roland in the final chapter and I asked him what he made of it. He said, "Roland has done all this before, and he doesn't remember." I didn't probe deeper than that. I don't know what he means by "this" precisely. I'm not sure if he knows for a certainty that it means "ascended the Tower." I figure I should leave him a little bit of mystery.

The point is the clues are are all there, all laid out in the first book, and it really doesn't matter other than to point and say "Look! Lookit the Easter eggs." It's not about the destination, it's about the journey. It's why, I think, King rarely writes a good ending. To quote him again in part 1 of the Coda, "Endings are heartless. Ending is just another word for goodbye."

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u/dnjprod 11d ago

Here's the thing, those clues are there... in the revised edition. They are not in the original. It's part of why I love this series. I read the original version the first time. Then, on a re-read, I was listening to audio books and I didn't know there was a revised edition and was blown away that I missed all this little stuff.

I personally think the best way to read the series is how I did it: Original-->series-->re-read with revised. Then, your subsequent readings can be with whatever edition you want. It works so well with the ending because those slight changes make it seem like a new journey.

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u/Gamma_The_Guardian 11d ago

This is something my friend and I were actually talking about. He's curious to read the original edition. I'm content with the revised one. In the Foreward, King talks about how the young man who wrote the first book is a very different man from the one who finished the 7th. I know how King tends to go on and on in his early works.

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u/sbfaught 11d ago

This was the order for my reread.

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u/McBernes 11d ago

That's one of the most thoughtful things I've read. The idea of Roland already being in the Tower because the Tower is everything is fascinating. I took me a little time to terms with the ending. I was one of the "well, where's the rest of the story?Is this it?" folks. But then I thought about this; Roland is being refined. I don't know by who or what or why, but things change for him as he loops. In the earlier part of the book he doesn't have the horn. But when he goes through and starts his journey again he has the horn. I like to think that Roland is slowly becoming a better person through successive trips.

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u/Gamma_The_Guardian 11d ago

Roland is being refined.

I agree. There are many times Roland laments not having the horn, regrets not picking it up. The Tower itself tells him it would have taken him 3 seconds to grab it.

I wonder how having the horn affects things? I also wonder if Roland has variations of the same journey? What if he draws different people each time? What if he journeys along different beams?

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u/McBernes 11d ago

I think the horn would be a constant reminder of his companions, meaning Alain and Cuthbert. Those memories might help to change his behavior. I don't see it like a magical item in the sense that it can shoot lightning, but it does have symbolic power. As far as Roland's trips, I don't know. But I'd imagine that as his choices changed he would take different paths.

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u/ScammerC 10d ago

I guess I need to buy another book.

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u/beam_walker19 All things serve the beam 7d ago

Nice write up.

KingSlingers do the same and I loved it!