The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger

The Man in Black pulls out a deck of Tarot cards and says that he will tell the gunslinger’s future. He calls the gunslinger “the world’s last adventurer. The last crusader” (231). The Man in Black turns the first card and it’s the Hanged Man. He says that the gunslinger is the “Hanged Man, plodding ever onward toward your goal over the pits of Na’ar. You’ve already dropped one co-traveler into that pit, have you not?” (231). The second card is the Sailor, which represents Jake, a drowning boy that nobody saves. The third card is The Prisoner, a card with a grinning baboon sitting atop “a young man’s shoulder. The young man’s face was turned up, a grimace of stylized dread and horror on his features” (231). The fourth card is The Lady of the Shadows, a two-faced woman who appears to be both smiling and crying. The gunslinger asks the Man in Black why he’s showing him these cards, and the Man in Black says, “Don’t ask. Merely watch. Consider this only pointless ritual if it eases you and cools you to do so. Like church” (232). The fifth card is Death, but not for the gunslinger. The sixth card is The Tower. The seventh card is Life, but not for the gunslinger. Then the Man in Black tells Roland that he isn’t the one he seeks, but rather he’s just “his emissary” (233). After this, the gunslinger falls asleep.

This section is presumed to be a vision that the Man in Black gives the gunslinger, while the gunslinger sleeps. It starts with, “The universe was void. Nothing moved. Nothing was,” and then the Man in Black says, “Let’s have a little light,” and there was light (234). Much like the creation story in the Bible’s Book of Genesis, stars suddenly fill the sky and water fills the earth below. The gunslinger watches as the earth is created, with land and seas and volcanoes, trees, grass, fields, and dinosaurs. Then, man is created and “Continents took shape before his amazed eyes, and were obscured with clocksprings of clouds. The world’s atmosphere held it in a placental sac” (235). The gunslinger witnesses earth and other worlds being created, and he begs the Man in Black to stop, as if the sight of it all is too overwhelming. Suddenly the “stars themselves began to shrink. Whole nebulas drew together and became glowing smudges. The whole universe seemed to be drawing around him” (236).

He again asks the Man in Black to stop, and he says that he will if only the gunslinger will give up his quest for the Tower. The gunslinger says “NEVER!” and the Man in Black says, “THEN LET THERE BE LIGHT!” and suddenly:

there was light, crashing in on him like a hammer, a great and primordial light. Consciousness had no chance of survival in that great glare, but before it perished, the gunslinger saw something he believed to be of cosmic importance. He clutched it with agonized effort and then went deep, seeking refuge in himself before that light should blind his eyes and blast his sanity. (236)

The gunslinger finally “fled the light and the knowledge the light implied, and so came back to himself. Even so do the rest of us; even so the best of us” (236). 

When the gunslinger awakes, it’s still night. Roland looks over to where Walter o’ Dim, also known as the Man in Black, had been sitting, but he’s gone. Suddenly the Man in Black is behind him, saying that the gunslinger did well, and that he “never could have sent that vision to your father” (237). He tells the gunslinger that he witnesses the universe, but that he’ll never have the Tower because it will “kill you half a world away,” meaning, if Roland couldn’t handle the vision of the universe, there’s no way he will be able to handle the truth of the Tower (238). He then tells the gunslinger that he was also Marten, that he “made your father and I broke him” (238). He goes on:

I came to your mother as Marten—there’s a truth you always suspected, is it not?—and took her. She bent beneath me like a willow…although (this may comfort you) she never broke. In any case it was written, and it was. I am the furthest minion of he who now rules the Dark Tower, and Earth has been given into that king’s red hand (238).

The gunslinger again asks the Man in Black what he saw in the vision, but it seems that the Man in Black doesn’t actually know. The gunslinger calls him a fake, but the Man in Black tells him to listen. 

This section is the Man in Black’s explanation of what Roland saw in the vision. He says, “The universe (he said) is the Great All, and offers a paradox too great for the finite mind to grasp. As the living brain cannot conceive of a nonliving brain—although it may think it can—the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite” (239). He continues:

There was a time, yet a hundred generations before the world moved on, when mankind had achieved enough technical and scientific prowess to chip a few splinters from the great stone pillar of reality. Even so, the false light of science (knowledge, if you like) shone in only a few developed countries. One company (or cabal) led the way in this regard; North Central Positronics, it called itself (240).

While not directly stated, the Man in Black seems to be explaining how the world came into its post-apocalyptic state, one that seems both primeval and futuristic.

The Man in Black continues by saying “our many-times-great grandfathers conquered the-disease-which-rots, which they called cancer, almost conquered aging, walked on the moon” (240). The gunslinger doesn’t believe him. The Man in Black says that despite these many advances, including artificial insemination and sun-powered cars:

this wealth of information produced little or no insight […] Few if any seemed to have grasped the truest principle of reality: new knowledge leads always to yet more awesome mysteries. Greater physiological knowledge of the brain makes the existence of the soul less possible yet more probable by nature of the search (240).

The gunslinger still doesn’t understand, and the Man in Black says, “Size encompasses life, and the Tower encompasses size” (241). He says that “Size defeats us,” and gives the analogy of how a lake is a fish’s universe, but what happens when that fish is pulled out of the water? Or, what happens when a person realizes that a pencil-tip “is not solid; it is composed of atoms which whirl and revolve like a trillion demon planets. What seems solid to us is actually only a loose net held together by gravity” (241). He asks what would happen if we, like a baby bird, saw the universe from inside the shell? What if we pecked through, what would we see? He wonders if we might discover that “our entire universe is but part of one atom on a blade of grass” (242). Then, what if that blade of grass “may have existed for only a single season in an alien time-flow” (242). He says that maybe, instead of the world having moved on, like the gunslinger thought, what if it’s actually beginning to dry up?

Finally, in describing the Tower, he says, “Suppose that all worlds, all universe, met in a single nexus, a single pylon, a Tower. And within it, a stairway, perhaps rising to the Godhead itself” (243). 

The Man in Black says it’s probably unwise to go into the Tower, to learn the ultimate truth. 

The gunslinger awakes to see the Man in Black staring at him. The gunslinger says that he himself was made for light, and the Man in Black says that it was impolite of him to forget. Then the gunslinger asks who the king is, and the Man in Black says that because of his king’s enchantment it will remain night until he and the gunslinger are done talking. He then says that he’s never actually seen his king, but that before the gunslinger can meet him he “must first meet the Ageless Stranger” and slay him (245). The Man in Black says he only knows his king because he comes to him in dreams, and that the gunslinger is the Man in Black’s climax, his “apotheosis” (245). The Man in Black also reveals that the Stranger’s name is Legion.

The Man in Black says that if the gunslinger kills the Stranger, he will find the Tower. He tells him to go west, towards the sea. He ends by saying, “You must understand the Tower has always been, and there have always been boys who know of it and lust for it, more than power or riches or women…boys who look for the doors that lead to it” (249). 

The gunslinger and the Man in Black talk all night. The Man in Black tells him that there is power in him. He also says, “Water must run downhill, and you must be told. You will draw three, I understand…but I don’t really care, and I don’t really want to know” (249). He then tells the gunslinger goodbye, and once again says, “Let there be light,” and it becomes light outside (250). 

When Roland awakes, he’s ten years older: “His black hair had thinned at the temples and there had gone the gray of cobwebs at the end of autumn. The lines in his face were deeper, his skin rougher” (250). He also notices that the Man in Black “was a laughing skeleton in a rotting black robe, more bones in this place of bones, one more skull in this golgotha” (250). However, Roland also wonders if it’s really Marten after all. He reaches over and takes the skeleton’s jawbone, placing it in his pocket.

He stands up and starts walking towards the ocean, and says aloud, “I loved you, Jake” (251). He walks and by the end of the day, he reaches the ocean. As it grows dark, he “dreamed his long dreams of the Dark Tower, to which he would someday come at dusk and approach, winding his horn, to do some unimaginable final battle” (251).