Author
Stephen King was born in
Portland, Maine in 1947, son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. He made his first professional short story sale in 1967 to Startling Mystery Stories. In the fall of 1973, he began teaching high school English classes at
Hampden Academy, the public high school in
Hampden, Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued to produce short stories and to work on novels. In the spring of 1973, Doubleday & Co., accepted the novel Carrie for publication, providing him the means to leave teaching and write full-time. He has since published over 40 books and has become one of the world's most successful writers.
Stephen lives in
Maine and
Florida with his wife, novelist Tabitha King. They are regular contributors to a number of charities including many libraries and have been honored locally for their philanthropic activities.
From Press Biography-StephenKing.com
Synopsis and Analysis
The Gunslinger aka Roland of Gilead is the last surviving soldier of the White Army from the place in the parallel universe where “the world has moved on”. This saying that world has moved on is little complicated to explain. It means that that the world we know is ceased to exist, and everything started with big drought that caused civil war to break out and was followed with total collapse of society. For example, after collapse there is no more progress in society, all technology is dead and nothing is functioning any more, even people and animals are defected with extra limbs and other anomalies.
Roland is on a quest to catch the man in black who’s his archenemy, and that’s the first step on his long journey to his ultimate goal- reaching the Dark Tower, or as we would say in our class the first threshold . He did not choose to do this it is all “Ka”. The closest definition of Ka is destiny, it is force that guides him and helps him on his hero’s quest. Dark Tower is the place he has to reach in order to save not only his and our world but the all the worlds that exist, and in the same time he does not know what’s in the Dark Tower or what is he supposed to do when he gets there. He doesn’t know all this in the beginning but as the story unfolds he gets the sense that the bigger things are on line than his personal quest. On his way through the desert he stops to spend the night with the farmer Brown and his crow Zoltan, where we learn about his time spent in Tull, the city he visited prior to coming to desert. In Tull man in black set up the trap for the gunslinger, he rose from dead one person and convinced everyone that Roland is the antichrist and needs to be stopped, but they are not match for gunslinger who ends up killing everyone in the town. Roland leaves the farm and comes to the way station and meets Jake Chambers 11 year old kid who joins him in his hunt. Jake is originally from our world, to be more exact from the
New York City. Man in black went into his world to kill him and to “draw” him in to the All-World, because in part one Jake is supposed to be sacrificed by gunslinger in order to talk with man in black, but in part II Drawing of the Three, he is brought back again from the different time and becomes part of the gunslinger’s “Ka-tet”. Ka-tet is group of people who came together under influence of Ka to do certain task, and who are very powerful while together. They proceed to the mountain where they have to go through underground tunnels. While in underground we also find out more about Roland’s past and how he had to beat his teacher Cort in order to become the gunslinger. There they get attacked by “Slow Mutants” creatures from underground. In the meantime they get close to the man in black and gunslinger has a chance to catch him, but Jack gets in
trouble and gunslinger has to make choice between saving
Jack and catching up with the man in black. This is the choice that he knew is going to come for him as a sort of a test, or another threshold for the hero. Roland feels that he doesn’t really have a choice here because it is all Ka’s doing.
He chooses to go after the man in black, and just before Jack falls to the abyss he tells Roland “Go then, there are other worlds that these”. This gave us indication that they might see each other again. Roland catches up with the man in black and has palaver with him, and the man in black reads gunslinger’s fate from cards. He finds out that in order to reach the Dark Tower he needs to bring three other people to the All- World from the other world to join him, and one of the people is Jake who just died in this world but still lives in other world, and that his true enemy is the one who controls the Dark Tower. Here we get hints of what lies ahead and starts to be more intriguing in a sense that we start wandering what he will find in the
Dark Tower. The man in black tries to persuade gunslinger to give up on his quest, but gunslinger refuses and the man in black makes him sleep for 10 years. When he wakes up he finds dry bones beside him and assumes that these belong to the man in black. Gunslinger continues his quest and starts to think of ways to bring the rest of the crew to the All-World. Part I stops here and we go to search for part II to see what happens next in this very promising start of the story of epic proportions.
Archetypes
The Gunslinger, full name Roland Deschain - is a typical warrior/wanderer archetype. He’s the last gunslinger from the long tradition of gunslingers that fought on the side of good, and he is in a life long search for the
Dark Tower which represents this hero’s quest. He has all the traits that heroes have, most importantly – mission. He is strong, brave, but in the same time merciless toward his enemies and his friends also, and he is ready to sacrifice them in order to reach the Tower, and also has some supernatural characteristics like his very long life. In the part I he is searching for man in black to reveal him path to the
Dark Tower. His own world has "moved on," and he is now is this new world for the purpose of finding a man.
The Man in Black - is a wizard archetype. He is Roland’s nemesis and was responsible for the end of Roland's world and the deaths of those who were close to Roland. He has many powers and he can even raise the dead like he did in the town of
Tull.
The man in black is a wizard who has lived for thousands of years. The man in black has answers that the gunslinger needs about the
Dark Tower.
Jake - is like the gunslinger warrior/wanderer archetype. Jake is a boy around 10 years old, he was drawn out of his own world into the world of the gunslinger by the man in black. He’s just an innocent boy who finds himself in the strange world on a mission, which he accepts like through warrior that he is. Jake is smart and strong and learns fast so that the gunslinger sees big potential in him right away.
The man in black intends Jake to be a sacrifice that the gunslinger must give to get the answers he has been seeking for many years. Later on in the
Dark Tower story he himself is going to become the gunslinger.
The Gunslinger and I
The question arises, why am I writing about this story? First I wanted to just mechanically dissect the story with symbols, mono-myth, thresholds etc, but gave up because there is more to this story than that, and it is kind of a personal nature. Instead I gave the synopsis with explanations to get the reader more info and chance to understand the plot; because I read the book twice and I still looked for other sources on the internet to figure out certain details. The answer to the question lies in our similarity in archetypes which are the same and similarities in personality. The main characteristic of the gunslinger is his sense of a mission. While his mission is to save the world, mine is little less ambitious, and it is concerned with saving me. I like him always had a sense of mission and I was always restless just like him. I like to travel a lot and see new places and some kind of adventure is always on my mind. I would say that I was driven by the same instincts that are in the gunslinger’s mind when I decided to leave my home country and move here all by myself- it was a great adventure. Further more, both of us have that nature that can not tolerate injustice with the difference that he can kill evil and unjust men ruthlessly but I can’t, but I would like that I can; and that’s the one of the things I appreciate about him- no mercy. There are more things that make us similar like the fact that both of us are in some kind of trouble all the time. Like him when he was a teenager I have also seen the war first hand and learned about what kind of things are human beings capable of doing. I early lost that childish romantic notion that all people are good and we are all big happy family that love each other and rest of the crap. Even though the war made me become a pacifist, which is quiet opposite of what war did to the young gunslinger; I still see the valid point in his way of doing things, many times there is no better cure for some other then the good old bullet. In conclusion, I’ve become more aware of all these similarities between us while reading the book for the second time and it made me realize that those are more important and personal way to pay the homage to this wonderful text.
