The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger

This section is the gunslinger’s dream. He sees that “Susan Delgado, his beloved, was dying before his eyes” (136). Two villagers are holding him back, and he thinks about how “This wasn’t the way it had happened—he hadn’t even been there—but dreams had their own logic, didn’t they?” (136).

She is being burned aliveand is trying to warn Roland about Jake: “The boy was looking down at him from a window high above the funeral pyre, the same window where Susan, who had taught him to be a man, had once sat and sung the old songs: ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Ease on Down the Road’ and ‘Careless Love’” (137). His eyes were “marble. A spike had been driven through Jake’s forehead” (137). 

Roland awakes in pain, still feeling “the dream of Mejis around him” (137). While dreaming, he had stuck his hand in the coals of the fire. He immediately gets up and runs into the willow jungle in search of Jake. He finally comes to a clearing with a “ring of black standing stones which looked like some sort of surreal animal-trap in the moonlight. In the center was a table of stone…an altar. Very old, rising out of the ground on a thick arm of basalt” (139).

Jake is standing outside the ring, “trembling back and forth” (139). The gunslinger steps into the ring and Jake screams. The gunslinger “felt it touch him—the spirit of the oracle, the succubus. His loins were suddenly filled with light, a light that was soft yet hard” (139). He grabs the jawbone from his pocket and tells Jake to look at it; Jake does, and immediately falls to the ground. The gunslinger picks him up and feels “the presence that dwelt in the circle of stones whirring with a jealous anger—its prize was being taken from it” (140).

He takes Jake back to the fire and “it seemed he could almost feel the laughter from the man in black, someplace far above them” (140). 

After carrying Jake back to the fire, the gunslinger ties him up to a bush. The gunslinger awakes to Jake calling to him because he’s hungry and upset, not understanding why he’s tied up. It’s clear Jake doesn’t remember the previous night. The gunslinger tells Jake that he has to go away for a while but gives him the jawbone, telling him to use it if he needs to.

The gunslinger thinks about how “the spirit of the stone circle was surely a demon, and very likely an oracle as well. A demon with no shape, only a kind of unformed sexual glare with the eye of prophecy” (142). The gunslinger pulls a pill out from his tobacco pouch and tells Jake that it’s mescaline, a drug that “wakes you up all the way for a little while” (143). Jake wonders if it’s like LSD, but the gunslinger doesn’t know what that is. After taking the mescaline, the gunslinger uses a needle and thread to sew up a hole in Jake’s shirt. Once the mescaline kicks in, the gunslinger leaves Jake alone by the fire and heads into the willow jungle. 

The gunslinger begins to hallucinate as he walks through the jungle. He stares at himself in a pool of water, feeling as “fascinated as Narcissus,” and realizing that his “mind-reaction was beginning to settle in, slowing down his chain of thought by seeming to increase the connotations of every idea and every bit of sensory input” (145).

He walks into the clearing and goes straight into the ancient circle, feeling the drug “coming harder now, faster” (145). He climbs onto the altar and “his teeth felt strange in his head, tiny tombstones set in pink moist earth” (146). He feels like his mind is “becoming a jungle full of strange thought-plants that he had never seen or suspected before, a willow-jungle that had grown up around a mescaline spring” (146).

The invisible oracle “pressed over him, a body made of the wind, a breast of fragrant jasmine, rose, and honeysuckle,” and the gunslinger tells her to make her prophecy. He feels aroused as the oracle sends him a vision of Susan. The oracle begs the gunslinger not to be so cold with her, and then tells him that three is the number of his fate, a demon named Heroine has infested a man he will meet, there are other worlds and other demons, and that “she comes on wheels” (149). She says there will also be death, but not for the gunslinger, and that “The boy is your gate to the man in black. The man in black is your gate to the three. The three are your gate to the Dark Tower” (150). At the end of the prophecies, the gunslinger tells her to have her way with him.

It’s assumed that the oracle has sex with the gunslinger by the description:

The shadow swung over him, enfolded him. There was sudden ecstasy broken only by a galaxy of pain, as faint and bright as ancient stars gone red with collapse. Faces came to him unbidden at the climax of their coupling: Sylvia Pittston; Alice, the woman from Tull; Susan; a dozen others. And finally, after an eternity, he pushed her away from him, once again in his right mind, bone-weary and disgusted (151).

He leaves the circle feeling defiled and sensing her “standing at the bars of her prison, watching him go from her” (151). 

Once back at camp, Jake runs towards the gunslinger with a “look of distress that made Roland feel the full, ugly weight of a coming betrayal” (152). Jake makes a fire and Roland catches three rabbits to make a stew for dinner.

The next morning, Jake and Roland leave camp and start climbing the mountains.

After climbing for quite some time, Jake sits on the edge of a cliff, dangling his feet. The gunslinger says, “Don’t roll over in your sleep or you may wake up in hell” (156). This makes Jake think about something his mom used to tell him and he gets visibly upset, asking the gunslinger why he’s here and why he forgot everything from before. The gunslinger tells him that he’s here because “the man in black has drawn you here. And because of the Tower. The Tower stands at a kind of…power-nexus. In time” (157). Jake says that he doesn’t understand, and the gunslinger says that he doesn’t either. However, the gunslinger is adamant that the world has somehow moved on, that “Something has happened to time. It’s softening” (157).

Jake asks the gunslinger where he comes from, and he says that he comes from a place called New Canaan, emphasizing that it’s a biblical name, a “land of milk and honey” (158). He says he’s the last from his land, and he starts to remember the former decadence of the central hall and the stone castles, but how slow mutants and decay had long since overtaken the beauty of his former home. He says his homeland fell because of a “revolution. We won every battle, and lost the war. No one won the war, unless maybe it was the scavengers” (159). 

The climb has grown more difficult, but Jake is still resilient. The air is growing colder the higher they ascend, and when Jake sleeps he seems to be having constant nightmares. 

The section opens with “A week after Jake saw the footstep, they faced the man in black for a brief moment in time. In that moment, the gunslinger felt he could almost understand the implication of the Tower itself, for that moment seemed to stretch out forever” (162).

Jake and the gunslinger come to a dead end when Jake suddenly, desperately wants to turn around. He tells the gunslinger “You’re going to kill me. He killed me the first time and you’re going to kill me this time. And I think you know it” (163). The gunslinger lies to Jake, telling him everything will be fine. It’s clear that Jake doesn’t believe him, but nevertheless Jake takes his hand and follows him. This is when they see the Man in Black standing about twenty feet above them. Roland tries to shoot at the Man in Black, but he misses. The Man in Black says, “Would you kill all your answers so easily, gunslinger?” (164). He then tells Roland that they will speak on the other side of the mountain, but it will only be the two of them, indicating that Jake won’t be there.

The gunslinger tells Jake he can stay here or follow him. After hearing something scream in the distance, Jake follows Roland up the mountain.