The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger

The gunslinger has been traveling for five days without seeing anyone when he comes across a “surprisingly young man with a wild shock of strawberry hair that reached almost to his waist” (9). The man is a corn farmer named Brown, and he has a pet raven named Zoltan that can speak random sayings. After a bit of small talk, Brown says that the Man in Black has passed this way. The gunslinger asks how long ago, and Brown says, “I don’t know. Time’s funny out here. Distance and direction, too. The bean man’s been twice since he passed. I’d guess six weeks. That’s probably wrong” (12). Brown asks if the Man in Black is a sorcerer, and the gunslinger responds, “Among other things” (12).

The gunslinger fills his water bags in Brown’s spring, and Brown cooks them a dinner of corn and beans. The gunslinger thinks about how he “had heard rumors of other lands beyond this, green lands in a place called Mid-World, but it was hard to believe. Out here, green lands seemed like a child’s fantasy” (14). 

The gunslinger falls asleep for an hour, and Brown wakes him up to tell him that his mule has died, and Zoltan has eaten the mule’s eyes. The gunslinger asks Brown if he believes in an afterlife, and Brown says he thinks they’re already in the afterlife.

Brown and the gunslinger eat a meal, and Zoltan says, “Lead us not into temptation” in an apocalyptic way (16).This causes the gunslinger to think “this was all an illusion, that the Man in Black had spun a spell and was trying to tell him something in a maddeningly obtuse, symbolic way” (16). This makes the gunslinger think about the city he previously visited, Tull, and how “I killed a man that was touched by God” while there, “Only it wasn’t God. It was the man with the rabbit up his sleeve. The Man in Black” (17). Brown replies by bluntly saying that this must have been a trap set for the gunslinger by the Man in Black, and the gunslinger agrees and is surprised that Brown doesn’t ask any questions about the incident.

The gunslinger thinks about killing Brown simply because he doesn’t want to have to sleep with one eye openbut decides against it because if he would stoop that low, he wonders why he should go on at all. Brown senses the gunslinger’s intentionsand tells him frankly that he doesn’t want anything from him but his life. So instead of killing Brown, the gunslinger tells him about his time in Tull.

This section, comprised of a flashback, starts with the gunslinger entering the town of Tull and hearing “Hey Jude” playing on a piano (19). While Tull was once a forest, it is now a:

monotonous flat prairie country: endless, desolate fields gone to timothy and low shrubs; eerie, deserted estates guarded by brooding, shadowed mansions where demons undeniably walked; leering, empty shanties where the people had either moved on or had been moved along; an occasional dweller’s hovel, given away by a single flickering point of light in the dark, or by sullen, inbred clam-fams toiling silently in the fields by day (19).

There are people on the streets, but not many, and each is ghostlike and strange. Most won’t make eye contact with the gunslinger because of his guns. The gunslinger immediately stops by a barn and pays a farmer to take care of his mule. On his way out of the barn he comes across a group of boys playing marbles in the street. The boys tell him that he might be able to find a burger at a bar called Sheb’s.

Sheb’s looks like a scene out of a western film, with batwing doors, a “[s]awdust floor, spittoons by the tipsy-legged tables,” a plank bar on sawhorses, and a piano (24). The bartender is a “straw-haired woman wearing a dirty blue dress,” and the bar is full of townies that stare at the gunslinger as he enters (24). The gunslinger sits at the bar and asks for a beer and three hamburgers, but he questions whether the meat will be pure beef, or “thread,” or whether it comes from something with “three eyes, six legs, or both” (25).

While he’s eating his burgers, a man comes up behind smelling like devil-grass, with eyes that “were damned, the staring, glaring eyes of one who sees but does not see, eyes ever turned inward to the sterile hell of dreams beyond control, dreams unleashed, risen out of the stinking swamps of the unconscious” (27).

The gunslinger decides that the man is no longer just inhaling the devil-grass but rather chewing it, and that by all rights he should be dead. The man then speaks to the gunslinger in the “High Speech of Gilead,” which makes the gunslinger shocked because “It had been years—God!—centuries, millenniums; there was no more High Speech; he was the last, the last gunslinger” (27).

The gunslinger gives the man, Nort, a gold coin, and everyone begins to leave the bar. The gunslinger asks the bartender if she has seen the Man in Black, and she says that there’s a price for that knowledge, that she has “an itch I used to be able to take care of, but now I can’t” (29). It’s clear that she’s asking him to sleep with her, and he decides that she’s not as unattractive as he originally thought. However, it wouldn’t matter if she were ugly, or if “the grave-beetles had nested in the arid blackness of her womb. It had all been written. Somewhere some hand had put it all down in ka’s book” (29). They go upstairs to where she lives, and the two presumably have sex.

Afterwards, the gunslinger rolls two cigarettes and gives one to her. She says that Nort was touched by God, and that he used to just drink, but then he started smelling the grass and then smoking it. Then he started chewing it. She says that he died in front of her bar, and that “You could see all the lights of hell in his eyes, but he was grinning, just like the grins the children carve into their sharproots and pumpkins, come Reap. You could smell the dirt and the rot and the weed. It was running down the corners of his mouth like green blood” (31).

He asks her again about the Man in Black, and she agrees to tell him about her encounter with him.

This section is the flashback of the bartender, Alice, also known as Allie. She says that the Man in Black showed up after Nort died, and that he might “have been a priest or a monk; he wore a black robe that had been floured with dust, and a loose hood covered his head and obscured his features, but not that horrid happy grin” (32). Upon arriving in town, he came into Sheb’s, where the townspeople were holding a wake for Nort. Nort’s body had been laid out on a table, and Sheb, the piano player, was playing Methodist hymns.

The Man in Black pushed his hood back and approached Alice at the bar, asking for a whiskey. Alice felt scared and aroused at the same time. She asks him if he is just passing through, and he says, “Don’t talk trivialities. You’re here with death” (35). She notices that his eyes are blue and that she “felt suddenly easy in her mind, as if she had taken a drug” (36).

The Man in Black tells the people that he’ll show them a wonder, and then he goes over to Nort and stares down at him, grinning. He spits on Nort’s face and Alice presumably masturbates behind the bar. Many of the townspeople flee the bar, but some stay while the Man in Black moves back and forth over Nort’s body. Suddenly, Nort draws a “deep, dry breath. His hands rattled and pounded aimlessly on the table” (38). The Man in Black keeps moving over Nort’s body and “[t]he smell of rot and excrement and decay billowed up in choking waves,” until finally Nort opens his eyes (38). Nort immediately leaves the bar to go find some devil-grass. The Man in Black keeps grinning.

Later that night, Allie works up the courage to go downstairs and sees Nort. He begins crying, wondering why the Man in Black brought him back to life still addicted to the devil-grass. He thinks maybe it’s all a joke to the Man in Black. From the gentle way Allie responds, it’s clear that she and Nort were once romantically involved. Nort gives Allie a note that the Man in Black left for her. It says that if she whispers the word “nineteen” to Nort, she will find out the secrets of death. The letter is signed Walter o’ Dim.

By the next day, things are already back to normal. However, Allie feels:

[a] pang of fleeting despair for the sad times of this world. The loss. Things had stretched apart. There was no glue at the center anymore. Somewhere something was tottering, and when it fell, all would end. She had never seen the ocean, never would (42). 

Allie’s flashback ends, and she’s back in the present, lying in bed next to the gunslinger. Allie is sad, thinking that the gunslinger will leave her in the morning, and he admits that he should leave because he feels like the Man in Black has left a trap for him. Allie wonders if she should say nineteen to Nort, but the gunslinger assures her that if she does, she will lose her sanity. As the two start to fall asleep, Allie thinks about how the gunslinger is like “something out of a fairytale or a myth, a fabulous, dangerous creature” (45). 

In the morning, Allie cooks the gunslinger breakfast. He asks if she has a map beyond the town, but she says that it’s only desert out there and nobody knows what’s on the other side. 

The gunslinger goes to see Kennerly, the man looking after the gunslinger’s mule. Kennerly is described as “a toothless and unpleasant old satyr who had buried two wives and was plagued with daughters” (46). It’s implied that he has sexual relations with at least his eldest daughter, Soobie, who is “blond, dirty, and sensual” (46). After Soobie winks at the gunslinger and pinches her nipple, Kennerly warns him that she’s wild with a devil, and that “It’s coming to the Last Times, mister. You know how it says in the Book. Children won’t obey their parents, and a plague’ll be visited on the multitudes. You only have to listen to the preacher-woman to know it” (47).

The gunslinger asks Kennerly about what lays beyond the town, but he just mindlessly chats and annoys the gunslinger. The gunslinger leaves Kennerly feeling like he hates him and that something strange is about to happen in the town. 

The gunslinger and Allie are in bed when Sheb, the piano player, busts through the door with a knife in his hand. The gunslinger and Allie have been eating, sleeping, and having sex for the past four days, and he “felt a growing (but strangely absentminded) affection for her and thought this might be the trap the Man in Black had left behind” (50).

Sheb comes into the room blabbering “like a man being drowned in a bucket of mud” (51). He tries to stab the gunslinger, but the gunslinger breaks his wrists. Sheb is clearly upset because he and Allie used to be lovers, and he’s jealous that the gunslinger has taken his place with her.

The gunslinger thinks he recognizes Sheb and asks him about Mejis on the Clean Sea. Sheb admits he was there, and the gunslinger asks him if he remembers the girl Susan and Reap night. It’s clear that something bad happened during this time and Sheb was part of it.

The gunslinger tells Sheb to leave before he kills him, and then he and Allie go back to bed. She asks about Susan, and it’s clear that the gunslinger loved her. 

The next night, “the bar was closed. It was whatever passed for the Sabbath in Tull. The gunslinger went to the tiny, leaning church by the graveyard while Allie washed tables with strong disinfectant and rinsed kerosene lamp chimneys in soapy water” (53). The gunslinger hides in the shadows of the church, listening to Sylvia Pittston, the preacher, preaching.

Sylvia is described as having “Breasts like earthworks. A huge pillar of a neck overtopped by a pasty white moon of a face, in which blinked eyes so large and so dark that they seemed to be bottomless tarns” (54).The gunslinger feels a “sudden red lust for her that made him feel shaky” (54).

Sylvia preaches a sermon on the “Interloper who came to Eve as a snake on its belly in the dust, grinning and writhing” (55). She says that the Interloper will return with the Last Times, and that he will come as the “Antichrist, a crimson king with bloody eyes, to lead men into the flaming bowels of perdition” (57). The crowd is riled up over her sermon, and the gunslinger thinks “suddenly, with terror and absolute surety, that the man who called himself Walter had left a demon in her. She was haunted. He felt the hot ripple of sexual desire again through his fear, and thought this was somehow like the word the Man in Black left in Allie’s mind like a loaded trap” (58). 

The gunslinger and Allie are in bed again. He wants to see Sylvia, but Allie says that Sylvia won’t see anyone. 

The gunslinger knows it’s his last day in Tull. He and Allie have breakfast together, and he will only see “her once more while alive” (61). 

There is a storm approaching when the gunslinger goes to Sylvia’s shack. He knocks on the door, but Sylvia doesn’t answer, so instead he kicks her door in. He finds her sitting on a rocking chair in the hallway. Sylvia tells him that the Man in Black “spoke to me in the Tongue. The High Speech,” is an “angel of God,” and that they slept together (62). She also calls the gunslinger the Antichrist. She knows that the gunslinger wants to sleep with her, but says, “The price of my flesh would be your life, gunslinger. He has got me with child. Not his, but the child of a great king” (63). The gunslinger tells her that she’s pregnant with a demon but that he can remove it.

It’s presumed that the gunslinger somehow ends Sylvia’s pregnancy when she says, “You’ve killed the child of the Crimson King. But you will be repaid,” and afterwards she reluctantly tells him that mountains lay beyond the desert (65). 

The gunslinger goes to Kennerly’s barn to retrieve his mule. The gunslinger accidently bumps into Soobie, causing her to drop a pile of wood. He notices that her “breasts thrust with overripe grandeur at the wash-faded shirt she wore” (66). He then gets his mule and leaves. 

The gunslinger stops at Allie’s bar on the way out of town, but no one is there. He fills his sack with food and leaves four gold pieces on the bar. He exits, thinking he might still make it out of Tull before encountering the trap the Man in Black had surely left for him, when “There was a shrill, harried scream from behind him, and doors suddenly threw themselves open. Forms lunged. The trap was sprung” (67). Everyone in town—men, women, and children—start running after the gunslinger with chunks of wood and knives. Allie is leading the mob, “coming at him with her face distorted, the scar a hellish purple in the lowering light. He saw that she was held hostage; the distorted, grimacing face of Sheb peered over her shoulder like a witch’s familiar” (67). She calls the gunslinger Rolandand asks him to kill her because she said the word nineteen to Nort and can’t bear what she has learned.

The gunslinger, thinking of himself as the last of his breed, shoots Allie. The crowd yells at him, calling him the Antichrist and the Interloper, and he shoots them all as well. By the end of the chapter, after a bloody rampage of shooting, Roland has killed everyone in the town. As he is about to leave town, he smells something “sickish-sweet,” and looks up to see that the “decaying body of Nort was spread-eagled atop the plank roof of Sheb’s, crucified with wooden pegs. Mouth and eyes were open. The mark of a large and purple cloven hoof had been pressed into the skin of his grimy forehead” (73). He cuts Nort’s body down before going inside the bar to eat a hamburger and drink three beers. He sleeps in Allie’s bed that night and leaves town in the morning. 

This chapter jumps back to the present, where the gunslinger is sitting next to Brown by the fire. Brown asks the gunslinger if he feels better after telling his story, but the gunslinger questions why he should feel bad for what happened. Brown replies, “You’re human, you said. No demon. Or did you lie?” (74). The gunslinger is adamant that he didn’t lie about anything he told Brown. 

The next morning the gunslinger leaves after eating breakfast, and Brown tells him that he’ll eat his dead mule. 

That night, the gunslinger “dreamed a thirsty dream. In the darkness the shape of the mountains was invisible. Any thoughts of guilt, any feelings of regret, had faded. The desert had baked them out. He found himself thinking more and more about Cort, who had taught him to shoot” (76).