The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger

There is no light in the passage under the mountains, meaning that “Neither of them had any means of telling the clock, and the concept of hours became meaningless, abnegate. In a sense, they stood outside of time. A day might have been a week, or a week a day” (174). Their journey in this passage is mostly silent except for the steady rush of water somewhere in the distance. The only way they can tell where they’re going is that they’re following a smooth path alongside the water, and the gunslinger can tell it’s the right way because it slants upward with the mountain. While walking in the dark, Jake stumbles upon an old railroad, and the two start following it “like blindmen. Roland leading, Jake following” (177).

After four periods of sleeping and waking, the two come upon a handcar. Jake shows the gunslinger how to use it, which ends up making their journey go along much quicker. 

They roll along quickly in the dark, and the gunslinger estimates they’re “making anywhere from ten to fifteen miles an hour, always on a shallow, almost imperceptible uphill grade that wore him out deceptively” (180). Their food is almost gone but “Neither of them worried about it” (180). Although Jake isn’t really talking to Roland anymore, he does ask Roland about how he came of age. He says that he’s always wondered about that, growing up. 

This section is a flashback to how Roland became a man. It’s summer in the “castle-city of Gilead,” and “In the west, some miles distant and near the borders that were the end of the civilized world, fighting had already begun. All reports were bad, and all of them paled to insignificance before the heat that rested over this place of the center” (183). Roland is wandering around the upper corridors of his home, sensing the danger of things but not really understanding what it means. It’s been three years since Hax was hanged, and Roland is starting to physically look more like a man. He is walking by his mother’s room, on his way to go to the roof to masturbate, when Marten, who is in his mother’s room, stops him. Marten invites Roland into his mother’s room. Marten is Roland’s father’s closest advisor, which makes his betrayal with Roland’s mother all the more treacherous. For the first time, Roland starts to hate Marten.

Roland’s mother makes idle talk with Roland, but Roland realizes it’s all a charade. Marten tells Roland to leave, to go on up to the roof to do what he was intending to do earlier, and it’s clear that Marten was trying to purposefully mess with Roland by inviting him into the room, as if he wanted Roland to know what was going on between he and Roland’s mother.

Roland leaves and he hears Marten hit his mother. 

Roland storms out of the castle and into the streets. He passes by his friend Jamie without saying anything, on his way to Cort’s house: “Roland walked to the cottage of his teacher and kicked the door open. It slammed backward, hit the plain rough plaster of the wall, and rebounded” (187). He kicks Cort’s table and yells his name. He speaks in the High Speech, saying, “Teach me no more, bondsman. Today I teach you” (188). Cort tries to get Roland to leave, saying that he’s two years early, but Roland refuses. So Cort, “who had cuffed him, kicked him, bled him, cursed him, made mock of him, and called him the very eye of syphilis, bent to one knee and bowed his head” (189). While it’s not directly stated, Roland must fight his teacher and win in order to be considered a man. However, most battles don’t occur until the pupil is much older.

Cort gives Roland one hour to get ready. He says that he will bring his stick as his weapon, and that Roland may choose whatever weapon he wishes. If Roland loses the fight with Cort, he will be exiled from the community forever. 

Roland keeps his aging hawk, David, in the cellar of a barn. As Roland approaches David, he’s reminded:

You cannot friend a hawk, they said, unless you are half a hawk yourself, alone and only a sojourner in the land, without friends or need of them. The hawk pays no coinage to love or morals. David was an old hawk now. The boy hoped he himself was a young one (190). 

He takes David onto his arm and tells him that he will die today, that he will “be made a sacrifice, like all those little birds we trained you on. Do you remember it? No? It doesn’t matter. After today I am the hawk and each year on this day I’ll shoot the sky in your memory” (191). With David on his arm,the gunslinger leaves the barn. 

The fight is to take place in the yard behind the Great Hall, and it “had been used for the rite of coming of age since time out of mind, long before Cort and his predecessor, Mark, who had died of a stab-wound from an overzealous hand in this place” (192). If Roland wins, he becomes a man who progresses from “darkness and unlearning to light and responsibility,” but if he loses, he can “only retreat, forever and forever” (192). Most boys attempt this battle at eighteen years old, and the yard is usually packed with family and friends of the boy. However, since this fight is taking place so unexpectedly, only Roland’s closest friends are on the sidelines to watch.

Cort appears and Roland tells him that his weapon of choice is David. Cort seems confused by this. The two begin to fight. Roland hurls David at Cort’s face. David attacks Cort’s eyes and rips at his skin. Cort falls to the ground but manages to beat David off of him, sending David to the ground with a broken wing. While Cort is on the ground with bloodied vision, Roland kicks him in the face. Roland trips and Cort gets up. Without David, “Roland had lost his advantage and both of them knew it. For a moment they looked at each other, the teacher standing over the pupil with gouts of blood pouring from the left side of his face, the bad eye now closed except for a thin slit of white” (195). While watching Cort above him, Roland feels something ripping at the skin of his hand; it’s David, and he’s still alive. Roland throws David at Cort, telling him to kill him.

David gets smashed between Cort and Roland, but David “had hooked one talon into Cort’s right ear. The other battered mercilessly at the teacher’s cheek, making it a ruin. Warm blood spattered the boy’s face, smelling of sheared copper” (196). Despite the attacks, Cort punches the bird, breaking its back and neck. With David out of the way, Roland smashes Cort’s nose in. Roland grabs Cort’s stick and tells him to “Yield or die” (197). Cort yields and asks Roland how long it took him to train the bird. Roland says, “I never trained David. I friended him. The key” (198). Cort then gives Roland a key, and Roland tells Cort that he will bury his bird tonight and then go to the brothel to sleep with the women that Cort usually sleeps with. 

Back in the present, the gunslinger asks Jake if he understood his story. Jake says yes, that “It was a game, wasn’t it? Do grown men always have to play games? Does everything have to be an excuse for another kind of game? Do any men grow up or do they only come of age?” (202). Then Jake says that he’s just a poker chip to Roland, which offends Roland. 

After waking up, they come upon the Slow Mutants. Jake screams when he sees the first one. It has a green face, with an expressionless node of eyes sitting above a flattened nose. The sight makes the gunslinger feel “an atavistic crawl in his intestines and privates” (203). He pumps the handcar faster and the glowing face of the Slow Mutant fades. However, another one breaks free and “shambled toward them. The face was that of a starving idiot. The faint naked body had been transformed into a knotted mess of tentacular limbs and suckers” (204). The gunslinger shoots the mutant in the head and four more charge the handcar. The gunslinger shoots the lead mutant in the head and it makes a “sighing, sobbing noise and began to grin. Its hands were limp and fish-like, dead; the fingers close to one another like the fingers of a glove long immersed in drying mud” (205). Another mutant tries to grab Jake’s foot, but the gunslinger shoots it in the chest.

The handcar begins to slow down as the mutants close in around them, and the gunslinger wonders if “Perhaps they only looked for a Jesus to heal them, to raise them Lazarus-like from the darkness” (206). The gunslinger shoots a mutant and the rest fall away, allowing the gunslinger to pump the handcar steadily and escape. However, up ahead, the Slow Mutants have placed rocks on the track. The gunslinger asks Jake to get off the handcar and remove the rocks while he shoots the oncoming mutants. Jake is terrified but complies. Just as the mutants are closing in, the rocks are removed, and Jake jumps back on the handcar. The gunslinger, full of adrenaline, quickly pumps the handcar. The remaining mutants on the tracks get hit and fly “like rotten bananas struck from the stem” (209). 

The only line in this section says, “They went on for three ‘days’ without incident” (210). 

After sleeping and waking four times, the handcar begins to sway to the right and they can see a light ahead: “As they approached the source of the glow, they saw for the first time that the rock wall to the left had fallen away and their tracks had been joined by others which crossed in a complex spiderweb” (210). Jake says that it looks like a subway, but the gunslinger doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Jake climbs up onto a cement walkway, and they look at “silent, deserted booths where newspapers and books had once been traded or sold; a bootery; a weapon shop,” and a woman’s clothing shop (212). They also see a dozen or so mummified men in blue uniforms, and the gunslinger says that they must have died from gas, and he thinks that “Perhaps once I the dim ago, the station had been a military objective of some long-gone army and cause” (213).

They start to leave the station, but Jake says he’s not leaving. The gunslinger thinks about how easy it would be to turn around and leave with Jake, to spare his life, but instead he walks away. Jake ends up following him.

After sleeping and waking three more days, “a spectral radiance began to grow again. They had entered the tunnel of some weird phosphorescent rock, and the wet walls glittered and twinkled with thousands of minute starbursts. The boy called them fot-suls” (215). They are still on the handcar following the tracks, but now the tracks are narrow and go over “a gulf of darkness—the chasm over the river” (216).

They get off the handcar and walk out over the river. The gunslinger notices that the “trestle was rotten, very rotten. It thrummed beneath his feet with the heady motion of the river far beneath, swaying a little on unseen guy wires” (217). The gunslinger can’t help but to think about “the awful space between this trestle and the river below. His brain viewed it in spectacular detail, and how it would be: the scream of twisting, giving metal, the lurch as his body slid off to the side, the grabbing for nonexistent handholds with the fingers, the swift rattle of bootheels on treacherous, rotted steels—and then down, turning over and over, the warm spray in his crotch as his bladder let go” (219).

They are almost to the other side when the Man in Black’s silhouette blocks the light. The Man in Black laughs, scaring Jake and causing him to lose his footing. Jake is now dangling on the edge of the bridge. Jake begs Roland to save him, but Roland is afraid that if he does, he won’t be able to catch the Man in Black in time. The gunslinger jumps over Jake instead of saving him, the bridge falls, and Jake falls into the abyss below. Safe on the other side, the gunslinger thinks:

there would be further degradations of the spirit ahead that might make this one seem infinitesimal, and yet he would flee it, down corridors and through cities, from bed to bed; he would flee the boy’s face and try to bury it in cunts and killing, only to enter one final room and find it looking at him over a candle flame. He had become the boy; the boy had become him. He was a werewolf of his own making. In deep dreams he would become the boy and speak the boy’s strange city tongue (223).

The Man in Black takes down his hood and beckons the gunslinger to follow him.