What is The Dark Tower about?

The most common refrain, that the series is a blend of traditional western and fantasy about the
gunslinger Roland and his quest for the Dark Tower only rings true for the first book, The Gunslinger,
and I would argue that The Gunslinger is a poor sample of the series. It is both tonally and ethically
distinct from the novels which follow it. It is dreamlike and often incoherent. The Gunslinger is a
series of bold images standing alone and free of context – we have almost no idea who Roland is or
why he is doing any of the things that he is doing – and the rest of the series spends much time
deciphering these images and mapping them onto a coherent story and world.

The Dark Tower is about companionship. It is about the group and the community. It is about how no
person is an island, how everybody needs the others around them to truly thrive, how a tiny amount of
rot can spoil the collective, and how we are all made up of all the people we have met across our lives.

The Dark Tower is about stories. It is about the thread of plot and the ways in which stories, like
people, are bound together. It is about the impact that fiction has on the human mind, the creative
process, the presence of the author in their work, and how truly meaningless the word “genre” can be.

The Dark Tower is a western, you say true. Sometimes it is fantasy, that is so. Often it is science-
fiction, and with some frequency it becomes horror. It is post-apocalyptic to an almost difficult to
fathom degree. The second book, The Drawing of the Three, contains a healthy dose of noir crime
fiction. The fourth novel, Wizard and Glass, is both a romance, a mystery, and a classical tragedy. One
of the stories told in The Wind Through the Keyhole is a fairytale. Roland and the Dark Tower seem
almost like figures from myth, Hercules and Yggdrasil reimagined.

The Dark Tower is about the journey, not the destination. The quest does not (and could never have)
culminated in a swelling of music and Roland bowing out to the tune of Happily Ever After. The Dark
Tower is about the road, and how the road changes people.
 The Ka-Tet, in order of appearance
Roland is not alone on his quest. In fact, there is quite the cast of characters who follow and support
him on his way. Of these, there are five that are of special importance. Six when we count the
gunslinger himself.

Roland Deschain, of Gilead

Roland is not an especially original main character. Indeed, King being so transparent about his
influences, there are three characters who make up the pith of his being. Aragorn, of Tolkien’s The
Lord of the Rings, is present in Roland’s nobility, his honour, and his knightly bearing. The man with
no name, of Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns, makes up Roland’s physicality, his hardness, his
attitude. Finally, Roland of Robert Browning’s poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came is the
true basis of the character: his sheer uncompromising drive to put one foot in front of the other until
he either falls down dead or makes it to the very summit of the Dark Tower. Browning’s Roland also
appears is Roland’s quiet nostalgia, his status as an anachronism wherever he treads, and his wistful
sense of better days that have gone by.

Roland is a fiercely literal character. He has little sense of humour and almost no imagination. He is
quick with his guns but fires them little, noble both by birth and in action, and absolutely dedicated to
his quest. He is the hero of every story, his guns forged from the metal of Excalibur, his cowboy hat
pulled low over his face as he strides into town, ready to drive out evildoers and protect good folken
from those who would do them harm, knight-errant and lawman both.

This responsibility is an incredible weight on Roland, and it is a weight that everything else in the
narrative feels. Roland does not select his ka-tet, nor do they ask to follow him. He draws his
companions, and they come to him inexorably, with no say in the matter. Roland, as the ur-hero, the
protagonist of all stories, cannot simply be told “no”. He is not stopped by debilitating injury, and
spends the overwhelming majority of the narrative missing the middle and index fingers of his right
hand.