The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger

When the gunslinger wakes up, his shirt and face are wet with water and the boy is beside him. The boy offers the gunslinger a tin can full of water and asks if he’s hungry. The boy says his name is John Chambers but that the gunslinger can call him Jake. The gunslinger notices that Jake is probably eleven or twelve and “well-made, handsome” (84). Jake says that a man who looked like a priest had camped out in his front yard not long ago. When the gunslinger asks Jake how long ago, he says, “I don’t know. I can’t remember time. Every day is the same” (86). Jake says that he hasn’t been here long, and then starts talking about a Zorro film and Times Square, but the gunslinger has no idea what he’s talking about.

Jake gives the gunslinger dried jerky and bread, and the gunslinger thinks about how Jake isn’t from the same world. When the gunslinger asks Jake where he came from, Jake says that he doesn’t know, that he just appeared here. Then he starts talking about how he used to watch different channels on TV, and again the gunslinger has no idea what he’s talking about.

The gunslinger asks Jake to tell him what he can remember, and Jake says he remembers a “lady with a crown and a torch” (89). Jake is frustrated because he can’t remember how he got here or where he came from, and the gunslinger tells him that he can make him sleepy and make him remember. 

This section is Jake’s flashback to his former life. He remembers walking back and forth to his private school, his nannie, his father, who worked for The Network, and his “mother, who is scrawny in a sexy way” and “often goes to bed with sick friends” (92). He remembers that he was rich, and then he “sees the man who kills him out of the corner of his eye. It is the Man in Black, and he doesn’t see the face, only the swirling robe, the outstretched hands, and the hard, professional grin” (94). He falls into the street after seeing this and is hit by a car. As he is dying, he hears a terrible voice saying, “I am a priest. Let me through. An Act of Contrition” (95). 

Back in the narrative present, the gunslinger thinks about how disturbing it is that the city and world Jake described doesn’t exist. The gunslinger asks Jake if he wants to remember his past, and he says no.

While Jake sleeps, the gunslinger pumps water from a pipe and thinks about how the machine is “a thing as alien to this place and time as true love, and yet as concrete as a Judgment, a silent reminder of the time when the world had not yet moved on” (97). He also thinks about how he is not usually a man to “dwell on the past; only a shadowy conception of the future and [that] his own emotional make-up saved him from being a man without imagination, a dangerous dullard” (98). 

When the gunslinger wakes, it is almost dark. He tells Jake that he’s going after the Man in Black so that he can take him to a tower. He says that Jake can come with him.

In the morning, the gunslinger goes down into the house cellar to look for anything they can take with them. The cellar is wet, smells bad, and has mutant spiders, or “muties” (102).

While gathering cans of food, the gunslinger hears a groaning in the foundations and feels a “dreamy terror wash over him, a feeling both languid and repellent” (102). He then hears a sound “as if something on the other side was digging itself through with slobbering, agonized intensity” (102). Jake hears it, too, and screams for the gunslinger to come back up out of the cellar, but the gunslinger tells Jake to run away.

In the High Speech, “his voice filling with the old thunder of command, Roland demanded: ‘Who are you, Demon? Speak, if you would speak. My time is short; my patience shorter.’” (103). With the voice of Alice, the thing beyond the wall tells Roland, “While you travel with the boy, the Man in Black travels with your soul in his pocket” (103).

Then, despite not wanting to, the gunslinger thrusts his hand through the wall and pulls out a rotted jawbone because “custom was strict, inviolable. Take the dead from the dead, the old proverb said: only a corpse may speak true prophecy” (104).

When the gunslinger emerges from the cellar, Jake runs over and hugs him. The gunslinger decides that he loves Jakebut wonders if this is another trap set by the Man in Black. The two set off for the mountains. Jake says that he feels like something is watching them. 

After three days of travel, the mountains are becoming more visible. Jake is tough and doesn’t complain, despite the difficult conditions of the journey, and the gunslinger thinks, “The boy had been placed in his path” by the Man in Black (107).

The gunslinger tells Jake that when the gunslinger was a little boy, an evil man lived in his city. Jake asks if it’s the priest (the Man in Black), and the gunslinger says that the evil man’s name was Marten and he was a wizard. He does wonder if Marten and the Man in Black were brothers. The gunslinger starts thinking about his childhood friend, Cuthbert, his old teacher, Cort, and his falcon, David, named “after the legend of the boy with the sling” (109). 

This section is a flashback to the gunslinger’s younger days. It’s spring, “what some called New Earth,” and Cuthbert and the gunslinger are taking falcon lessons from Cort. Cuthbert and the gunslinger “spoke the low speech, the language of both scullions and squires; the day when they would be allowed to use their own tongue in the presence of others was still far” (110).

David, while in Cuthbert’s care, barely catches his target. Cort calls Cuthbert a maggot and slaps him in the ear, causing him to bleed. Cuthbert tries to defend himself, and Cort tells him to “Speak your Act of Contrition in the speech of civilization for which better men than you will ever be have died, maggot” (111). Cuthbert speaks the High Speech to Cort. David lands on Roland’s arm, causing the skin to tear under his claws, and Cort tells Roland that the hawk doesn’t respect or fear him and that it’s “God’s gunslinger” (112).

As punishment for messing things up with the hawk, Cuthbert is ordered not to eat dinner. Cuthbert thanks Cort for the instructive day, and he and Roland walk away. 

Cuthbert and Roland visit the cook, Hax, and sneak food behind Cort’s back. The children like Hax because he often sneaks them delicious food. While sitting behind a “huge, sweating stone colonnade, out of sight of the kitchen,” the children are eating pie when they suddenly hear a guard approaching Hax. While eavesdropping, the children hear Hax say, “I know my responsibilities to him; you don’t need to lecture me. I love him just as you do. Would foller him into the sea if he asked; so I would” (117). Then the guard tells Hax that he will bring him poisoned meat, and it’s clear that Hax is supposed to serve it to all the children of the town.

The children feel betrayed by what they hear, wondering how someone they had always felt close to could intend to kill them. 

Roland’s father, Steven Deschain, is back from a trip to the uplands. Steven, the town’s highest-ranking gunslinger, is “dressed in black jeans and a blue work shirt” (119). Roland tells his father about Hax’s plan to poison the town’s children, and it’s clear that Hax will be executed for treason. Steven wonders how Roland feels now that he is inevitably causing Hax’s death and says, “Morals may always be beyond you” (120). 

Cort lets Cuthbert and Roland out of the day’s lessons because they have letters from their fathers saying that they may attend Hax’s execution. Cort tucks the letters into his shirt pocket because in Gilead, “paper was easily as valuable as gold” (122). Cort gives the boys unleavened bread and tells them to put it under Hax’s shoes after he’s been hung.

While at the gallows, Cuthbert and Roland have second thoughts about watching Hax’s execution. Roland pulls a splinter from the gallows’ railing and puts it in his pocket so that he can always have it.

Hax is carried “in an open cart, but only his huge girth gave him away; he had been blindfolded with a wide black cloth that hung down over his face. A few threw stones, but most merely continued with their breakfasts as they watched” (126). The executioner asks Hax if he has anything he wants to confess, but he says no. He begins to say “I never” but is cut off by the sound of the trap dropping underneath his feet. Roland is confused, wondering if Hax was really a traitor, and he wonders where Hax finished “the last sentence he would ever begin on earth” (127).

Cuthbert and Roland spread the breadcrumbs underneath Hax’s dangling feet, and Roland thinks that it’s symbolic in some way. 

In this section, Roland is now back in the present with Jake. They have finally made it to the mountains, and they can see the Man in Black climbing up a slope, although he appears tiny because he is still a good distance away.

They begin climbing the mountains, and Roland thinks about how Jake will be a sacrifice in some way.