Answering a First Time Reader’s Question about the Ending of The Dark Tower Series by Stephen King
I include this for the sake of completeness, since I had mentioned in my previous post about The Dark Tower movie.
“Hi people, I’ve just finished my first journey and mourned the loss of my travelling [sic] companions. Can someone please explain the ending. Of course I continued to read past when Mr King suggested I stop”
—a disappointed reader
I will explain why the series ended as it did.
It comes as the result of a combination of at least four things:
1. The expression of the author’s worldview.
2. The technical and practical limitations of the craft and the author,
3. The nature of reality,
4. The insatiable and unreasonable expectations of readers looking for someone else to do what they have been unable to do themselves: come up with a full, sensible, convincing, and satisfying explanation of What It’s All About.
1. The author’s worldview.
Given what appears to be the author’s belief that one is the author of one’s own story that one is creating from within one’s own story, then this ending, the ‘bear goes over the mountain and what do you think he saw” ending, is hardly surprising.
This is especially so given the fact that the entire DT series appears to be an expression of the concept that everyone, at some point in life, becomes aware of his own existence in what appears to be a previously-existing world and, accepting its existence as self-evident, believes it must have some internal logic, as he himself self-evidently has, and a grand end (telos) that drives it all forward.
As a result, he then goes forward into that life in what amounts to a quest to discover just what that driving force is.
The Tower itself, in the beginning, its own essence rumored but unknown, was that great mysterious force:
It was the axis representing the intersection of all other planes of existence, the unimaginable and wholly other linchpin of all reality.
But in the story, its power to drive the story, its ability to imbue life with meaning, to give form to and to make sense of all existence, turned out to be inversely proportional to Roland’s distance from it.
Here is how that story is a microcosm of the readers’ own existence:
Going through life, one acquires experiences and establishes relationships that all seem to point toward that elusive central truth that holds it all together. But as one approaches it and, coincidentally, the end (though not necessarily the telos) of one’s life, all those things that had seemed to give it meaning and structure and purpose and direction start to fall apart and fall away until, in the end, like in the beginning, one has nothing left but the consciousness of one’s own self and, unlike the beginning, perhaps one’s memories of the scenes of one’s own life.
When experienced from within the flow of life, they seemed to have been the expression of some great purpose and design, the source of which lay beyond both one’s own self and one’s own life but, as one rises up out of that plane of existence at the end of one’s quest, one realizes it was all nothing more than one sensing of oneself as author trying to make sense out of what, apart from that—one finally sees—makes no sense at all.
That final realization, “So, this is all it is?” then oblivion, well, that really IS fear in a handful of dust.
For Roland, with the increasing passage of time and his decreasing distance from the Tower, the general but deeply meaningful sweep of his earlier life gradually became converted into a series of increasingly specific, but increasingly meaningless, WTF anecdotes that, one by one, stripped away from him all his in-story sources of life, love, and meaning: his mother, his father and home, Susan Delgado, his saddle buddies, then Jake, and then Jake again, Eddie, Susannah, Oy, until he finally reached the Tower.
And then, once there, he discovers that the Crimson King, supremely menacing from a distance in both time and space, was just some crazy loon trapped out on a lower balcony of the Tower, a danger, sure, but one that could literally be (mostly) rubbed out by a mute kid who could draw well once he finally got his hand on some erasers.
Then, at last, Roland breaches the portal of the Dark Tower, the edifice he had believed to be the hub of All Existence.
But once inside and with each upward step, the Tower seems, with increasing force, to exhibit a right hand rule of solipsism:
It ascends from the red rose plane of general existence through levels that become increasingly personal, increasingly specific, but increasingly meaningless, just like his journey to the Tower itself.
The Dark Tower, or rather Roland’s story about the Dark Tower (and one should give careful thought to the distinction between God and one’s ideas about God), eventually reveals itself to be a center that truly does not hold, all talk of saving the Beams notwithstanding, and Roland finally rises up and out of the Dark Tower, passing into an oblivion that resolves itself into Roland again pursuing the Man in Black across another wasteland that will inevitably result in even more fear in yet another handful of dust.
2. The technical and practical limitations of the craft and the author
Jeez, so what else could anyone reasonably expect given all the buildup about The Dark Tower?
If not this ending, then the revelation of the mystery of the The Dark Tower would have to be as bitchingly MORE interesting and MORE satisfying that the entire story up to that point, or at least most of the story until the point where the series’ arc entered the bumpy glide path down into senescence and death.
Come on, Stephen King can write some really good stories that start by dipping down into whatever imaginative universe he created for them, traveling along in it for a while, coming to a satisfying conclusion and then end by rising back up out of it.
For example, The Sun Dog was a story that presupposed the prior existence of all the main characters. So where do you start the story? With the boy’s birth? With his parents’ courtship and marriage? With their births? With their grandparents’ births? With the formation of their earth from the accretion of planetismals?
And where to stop? With the boy’s graduation from high school? With his marriage? With his final days in a nursing home on oxygen and pissing himself over nightmares about the sun dog?
It’s all a matter of time, effort, and relevance. You find the story and tell it. That’s like finding and drawing attention to a flower. If you want to go into all the conditions that resulted in that flower being there and looking the way it did, then that’s a combination of botany and geological history, but it’s not a story.
For a story, its logical progression and meaningful ending can be devised because it’s taking place within a universe at least partially understood by the readers and because both its logical progression and meaningful ending rely on the limited and understandable aspects of life shared by the majority of readers. So you dip down to that flower and snap your picture. You don’t have to include the entire forest.
Stephen King alluded to this dipping down into an imaginative universe and back out of it that defines the story in Stand by Me.
Around the camp fire, Gordie carried his friends down into the story of David Hogan, AKA Lardass, and the barf-o-rama. The story came to a satisfying conclusion and they all rose back up out of the Lardass universe to find themselves back around the campfire in their own.
Stephen King, like himself as the grownup successful author Gordie remembering the boy author Gordie in Stand by Me, can create really good stories with understandable motive forces (revenge for being called Lardass, wanting to find the body and to be famous for being the first to report it but then just wanting to do the right thing for the dead boy and fuck over Ace and his goons), stories that begin and end satisfactorily within a posited world or a world within a world within a world.
As an author you dip down into the story and at some point before the end of the world of the story you rise back out, like Gordie did as they sat around the campfire.
3. The nature of reality
In reality, an ultimate driver of all existence that lies outside everyone’s imagination and experience, literally One Step Beyond, can, in the context of a story, be posited and alluded to but never satisfactorily described; and that’s because it lies beyond anyone’s experience.
And here is as good a place as any to draw attention to the nature of a story, the nature of real life, and the absurdity of folks who claim that stories need to be like real life (I’m pretty sure by that they mean their real life).
One time I asked a psychologist if he knew who were the greatest psychologists of the Western world. He started naming folks known as psychologists.
No, I said. None of them. The greatest psychologists are the great novelists of Western Literature.
How so, he asked.
Because, I said, they pretty much knew people inside out. Not because they were novelists but because they understood people’s nature, their beliefs, their motives, their foibles, their almost Procrustean relationship with both truth and falsehood in relationship to what they wanted to be true but wasn’t or what they wished was false and were trying to invent whatever they could, if not to convince themselves of it, then to provide themselves deniability or at least an excuse of, “Well, I tried.”
And the novelists did it all in the context of a story. And stories are WAY more intelligible and like life than dry, boring essays on the nature of mind, language, motives, self-deception, self-sacrifice, cruelty, and belief. Why? Because none of those things can truly be understood outside of the context of the relationships of life, relationships that have always been showcased in every culture by storytellers everywhere.
But since, for most people, most of everyday life consists mostly of action that, were it a movie, would be a film of paint drying or days of video taken from a stationary point inside a parking garage, something that would be generally described by some Shakespeare character along the lines of “A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Sure, it’s “real,” but, in terms of momentous occurrences that illustrate the big questions of life, of the ore of everyday life is pretty low grade. The great novelists, though, know how to construct, from all the disparate elements of daily life, what is the literary equivalent of the enrichment of low grade uranium ore into something that, although it was always implicitly or partially true, now is in a form that can go boom and illustrate what is often too diffuse to perceive or too piecemeal to make sense of in one’s own life.
But when those writers do that in the context of story, all becomes clear in a way that results in even “ordinary” people responding with, “Damn! It’s so obviously true.”
The authors at that level have two principal abilities (taking for granted their linguistic ability to describe the outcome of the other two).
One is the ability to see past the jumble of conflicting events that arise from multiple, overlapping storylines, even within single individuals, many of which storylines may lead nowhere or just have not yet revealed enough information even to guess where they may be headed, and to isolate just the parts that do make sense.
The other ability is the capacity and quality of their imagination in which they can set up, as though in a virtual reality lab, those parts that make sense and run them through basic story structures abstracted from life and common to most people around the world and throughout history and run them through the changes of the basic situations of the story and then hand the outcomes to people.
Well, not merely the outcomes, because that would be boring and similar to someone merely producing a book of maxims. It’s far more interesting to follow the story along to see how those outcomes are realized. And even though it’s fiction, if there’s enough verisimilitude in the nature of the characters and their interactions, then the story can be taken by the reader as the functional or imaginative equivalent of experience, which makes the nature of those outcomes all the more believable. In those stories, the readers can see some of those same things in their own lives looking back at them but in a way that makes sense of what they may not have even realized was going on. And that is the genius of those writers.
Furthermore, the general ability of people to perceive the essential truths of life portrayed in a story, even if they were incapable of writing such a story themselves or even directly recognizing those truths in an abstract way, much less stating them as such, is probably what underlies the ubiquity and power of myths around the world.
And it’s also the exact opposite of propaganda, the goal of which is to create a false appearance of reality to motivate the reader to fulfill the goals of the propagandist rather than, like the novelists do, to give the reader a deeper and more accurate perception of life and an understanding of his relationship to it, leaving it up to the reader to accept it or not, to benefit by it or not. Which explains why propaganda, compared to actual storytelling, is like the serving suggestion on a cardboard box compared to an actual meal.
Someone in some online writing group told me that my characters in The Boy Who Could Step Sideways didn’t think and talk like kids of that age. Sort of funny, because I did. I told her that if the existence of her entire reality depended on a couple of kids in a school spotting anomalous stuff, determining that certain teachers were not, in fact, human, figuring out what was going on, and then devising a way to do something about it, then she had better hope those kids were smarter than fuck. And if we’re going to posit unusual occurrences and special abilities and a story unlike people will ever experience in real life, I should have to restrict my characters to being dolts?
Why even write a story with a lot of artificial constraints that folks come up with in those writing groups, like, “You can’t, as the writer, show what’s going on in a character’s mind. You can only show that by the character’s actions.” Says who? Some writing teacher? “The author talking to the writer is, like writing from an omniscient point of view, something that’s just not done. You can only be an observer of the character.” I guess what she was really into was being a literary peeping Tom.
You may as well say that you can’t use the letter ’s’ or any words longer than seven letters or that all the action has to take place over the course of a single day (like Meinhard DeJong’s The Wheel on the School). The only rule is to do whatever you want to do in whichever way you want to do it that will result in your story actually being a story, having a point, and reaching a satisfying conclusion.
Because of this, in any story there are reasons for things in terms of story and reasons in terms of storytelling that don’t necessarily mesh.
There are stories where the two do mesh well, such as The Lord of the Rings.
In this story there is an existential danger threatening all the (non-evil) societies of Middle Earth; the evil arose because of actions ages ago that failed to put it down when it tried to enslave the world using a technology created even longer ago. And the Shire in Middle Earth, at that time thought by its inhabitants to be simply reality, was, in fact, a carefully watched over and guarded little piece of paradise in the midst of the ruins of a former world.
The Ring of Power that was the fulcrum upon which worlds would be irrevocably moved in one direction or another just happened to fall into the hands of an inhabitant of that small place where nothing much happened besides some farmer getting pissed off over his mushrooms being stolen. And from there the story develops of a group of the least likely folks in the world tasked with the responsibility of destroying the most powerful object in the world in order to save the world.
In The Lord of the Rings, after the ring had been disposed of by Frodo getting his finger with the ring bitten off by Gollum who, with the ring, gets burned up in the volcanic fires in which the ring had been forged, after the mopping up of the remains of the armies of Mordor and the setting right of the shire, the story, from the readers’ point of view, ends with the ring bearers and the elves going off in their grey cloaks by ship to the West never to be heard from again.
This creates a sense of linearity or historical continuity both for Middle Earth and for the emigrants to the West; their roads go ever on until they disappear beyond the horizons of the story—we, the readers, just can’t go along or stay behind to see what happens next. There was an intelligible climax and then a conclusion that made sense.
But in the Gunslinger series, things don’t go so smoothly.
There is a trio of evils of the Man in Black, the Walking Man, and the Crimson King, somehow related, and an ongoing attack on the Tower, the linchpin of all existence through which ran the beams, created in some unimaginable past, that holds all reality together.
The continuing existence of the Tower gives meaning and purpose to everything. It was endangered and Roland believes his sole purpose in life is to see the Tower and to save it; eventually understood to be accomplished by means of stopping the attack on the beams that is, presumably, in some way being facilitated by the Man in Black, the Walking Man, and the Crimson King; however, the means by which their enmity toward the Tower is made incarnate, so to speak, in order to set up and to staff vast evil corporations across a variety of worlds to recruit or kidnap beam breakers is never made explicitly clear.
The explanation for that is lost with the demise of the bad guys:
the Man in Black, dying along the way after the journey through the mountains,
the Walking Man, suddenly appearing to rescue the incompletely-capped Randall Quick in the last minutes of the great city of Lud and disappearing with him into Blaine, the monorail, maybe reappearing again in the Emerald City in a different guise,
and the Crimson King, ending up being just some kind of enraged nutcase trapped on a lower level outer balcony of the Tower and being unable to get back inside (maybe he had gone through the door looking for the privy).
Most of the series is devoted to the Tower as the be-all and end-all of existence within the greater context of ka, a 50% shorter way of spelling “fate,” and able, presumably through ka, of recruiting a ka-tet of gunslingers to vanquish the danger and save all of reality, though strangely unable, by the same means, of anticipating the danger and preventing anyone from even starting the work on breaking the beams.
The entire series builds the Tower up and up and up, though its actual nature remains a mystery, making it ever more mysterious by all the wonders it is able to facilitate and all the horrors being mounted against it.
EVERYONE, both readers and principal characters (and no doubt the author), wants to discover what it is, how it’s able to do all it does, and what is so special about it that it becomes simultaneously the ultimate focus of all evil and of all heroism.
And here’s where the gears of the story and the gears of the storyteller started to clash and grind.
Given all the different things that a vast audience along the way has surmised about the Tower’s nature, there is no way in the world that any author can possibly come up with an answer about the Tower’s true nature that will satisfy every reader.
To do that, it would actually have to be the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.
Listen to Benjie and Franky Mouse in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy explain how well that went (and do it by listening to the audio version by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop version of the first 12 episodes, the best radio story that’s ever been done in the history of radio—eat your heart out, Orson Welles).
In The Lord of the Rings, from the earliest part of the story, readers easily understand that the destruction of the ring will mean the destruction of Sauron and his armies and the altering of pretty much everything. But to understand that, no one ever has to know the technological aspects of how that one ring could dominate the twelve rings of men and the ring of the elves and the ring of the dwarves and through them control everything by focusing the power of the wearer’s intellect and will; they only have to know that it’s capable of doing so.
The same is not true in the Gunslinger series where the mystery of the nature of the Tower’s power and importance is constantly the focus of both the principal characters and the readers and just as big a deal as the effect that saving it will have on saving reality.
In The Lord of the Rings, the saving of reality though the destruction of the Ring is achieved in a satisfying manner without having built up the expectation of a Big Reveal into the true nature of the Ring and how it’s able to exert its power.
That this was NOT the case in the Gunslinger series is seen in this nearly universal reaction of readers at the end of the story:
“Yeah, okay, good, the Tower was saved at the cost of Eddie, Jake, and Oy losing their lives so the Beams could regenerate and save all of existence; the Rose is safe, yay—but just what the hell did Roland find in the Tower that would make sense of it all?”
4. The insatiable and unreasonable expectations of readers looking for someone else to do what they have been unable to do themselves: come up with a full, sensible, convincing, and satisfying explanation of What It’s All About.
To see this, my answer to a Vern sort of reader (who asked if what happened to Roland was his being in hell) should suffice:
“Well, since Roland wasn’t actually aware of it then it wouldn’t seem like eternity or hell. If, in reality, and if you were aware of it, then that could seem like hell. However, in the context of the story as an expression of the author’s beliefs about reality, that’s a different matter.”
But this wasn’t a satisfactory explanation for this reader who wants a solution inside the story that’s as satisfying as one outside the story in real life. But it’s just not going to happen. As mentioned earlier, some point you have to come out of the story and back into real life.
And guess what, it’s not going to happen there, either.
In Stand by Me, once the boys re-emerged from Gordie’s world of Lardass and come back to themselves sitting around the campfire (sound familiar?), Teddy says, “What happened? What happened to Lardass?”
In what Stephen King says through both Teddy and Vern, he describes typical readers, readers that can be observed in almost every thread on the Facebook page dedicated to The Dark Tower.
There are the readers, represented by Teddy, who want to co-opt the story:
“Why don’t you make it so that Lardass goes home an’ shoots his father. An’ he runs away. An’ an’ he joins the Texas Rangers.”
Then there are the readers, represented by Vern, who treat the story as real:
“But there’s one thing I didn’t understand. Did Lardass have to pay to get into the contest?”
See how almost exactly similar fictional Vern’s mindset is to this reader on the FB page dedicated to The Dark Tower series:
“Fellow gunslingers, I need to ask a question that I've had in my head for at least a month now. What was the reason that people had so many twins in Callas? Was it just the byproduct of the whole "everything has its twin" thing, or did people from Fedik cause it on purpose? Is that explained anywhere? Thankee sais.
“It’s because the author needed a plot device.”
—Gregorio Enrique Sandoval
And note also how other readers, like this Daniel guy, cannot stand to be reminded that the story has no independent reality other than as an expression of the writer’s imagination set down on paper.
“Nooooo. :)”
—Daniel Lacroix
“Come on, the only cause-and-effect in the story is in the authors mind. If it’s done as a better than average simulacrum of reality then readers will treat it as reality (while they suspend disbelief in the course of reading it). Others, though, go on to treat the story as a self-existent reality and look for cause and effect between elements of the story when none actually exist except in the author’s mind. The author is to every element of his story what reality as a whole is to the God of John Calvin: wholly and artfully contrived where nothing is as it appears to be, not even those to whom it is appearing to be that way.”
—Gregorio Enrique Sandoval
“So then why are you on a site about the discussion of the underlying elements of the stories?”
—Daniel Lacroix
Because, I told him, the elements of the story are what is there on the page.
Talk about what IN the story could have CAUSED something IN the story is not a discussion about underlying elements IN the story because no event on any page was caused by any other event on any preceding page.
That is, the only elements “underlying” anything in the on-page story are the off-page choices the author made about the plot of the story.
Otherwise one is doing something that was explicitly pointed out by the screenwriter of Stand by Me:
Vern: You think Mighty Mouse could beat up Superman?
Teddy: What? Are you cracked?
Vern: Why not? I saw the other day he was carrying five elephants in one hand!
Teddy: You don't know nothing. Mighty Mouse is a cartoon. Superman is a real guy. No way a cartoon could beat up a real guy.
Vern: Yeah. Maybe you're right. Would be a good fight though.
So here’s a question in literary criticism that makes no sense at all (for reasons mentioned above):
“Did people from Fedik cause it [the preponderance of twins] on purpose?”
And here’s a question in literary criticism that does make sense:
“Has Stephen King given any indication whether he considered his use of the large number of twins to be connected to his concept of twinners, and was it a conscious playful twist that in other stories twinners existed in side-by-side worlds but in this one he posited the twins who existed side-by-side in their own world in the Calla being used by those who are trying to bring down all the worlds?”
Given readers like this, not to mention the nature of reality itself, it’s unreasonable to expect Stephen King to have come up with the meaning of life, the universe, and everything of both this and all possible universes that will be universally satisfying to every reader.
It cannot be done.
In the end, since the author found it impossible, given the buildup, to satisfy everyone and because he apparently just could not allow the story to peter off into the mists of time and distance like the end of the Lord of the Rings, he opted for something that, for him at least, felt as though it had some sort of logic in terms of story themes because the circularity of the ending could be seen as pointing back to the description of ka as a wheel being the basic nature of reality and the unpleasantness of the ending and, therefore, the basic nature of that whole world, pointing back to Eddie’s earlier description of it all as ka-ka.
Sort of like, “Shit happens and then you die” but with a twist: “Shit happens and then you die and then it happens again and again, world without end, amen.”
Besides, given human nature, you can be sure there are people who, even if given the meaning of this life and the universe, would bitch because it’s not like they wanted it to be.
So before that big reveal in the last book, Stephen King warns the readers that they still have time to rise back up out of a finished story like they’re supposed to and not get horribly disappointed when the author’s ending is not their ending. Something along the lines of:
“Dear Reader: stop now or don’t complain to me later about what you find.”
So, with that choice, if they don’t, any dissatisfaction (Teddy) or puzzlement (Vern), it’s their own damn fault.
The What’s It All About, Alfie moral of the story?
Neither a Vern nor a Teddy be. Get out while the getting is good, like Susannah Dean had the sense to do, and enjoy your life on an alternate plane of existence (or at least in another book), even if the vending machines there don’t dispense Coke but Nozz-a-la Cola.
But at some point in The Dark Tower series, and I believe that was the Susan Delgado story, the Dark Tower narrative becomes like the point in a very long journey that one decides to leave the mainland and go island hopping across an ever-thinning archipelago of stories, each more and more distant, less and less inhabited, losing friends along the way, hoping that the goal will somehow make it all make sense in the end, until at last he finds himself on the equivalent of a tiny coral island with only a couple of coconut palms, finally beholding what actually underlies what he thought was the object of the journey—nothing but a vast and ultimately meaningless expanse.
To turn around is to see no way back.
To go forward is death.
To remain on the islet is death.
So it’s, “What the hell! I may as well take the plunge and see what the author has come up with even though I’ve been warned. Maybe it won’t be so bad.”
But it is.
And then the reader waits for it to fade enough in memory to begin again, hoping it will somehow be different, and it is, but only in the appreciation in the scenery along the way, not in the ultimate destination.
And after several times through the series, he will realize that his repeated readings are pretty much the equivalent of the recursiveness that is Roland but without even the horn of Eld to hint at the possibility of a change.