Roland Deschain of Gilead

Roland Deschain is Mid-World’s last hereditary gunslinger. He is also the direct descendent of Arthur Eld, the ancient King of All-World. (Roland’s ancestor was mothered by one of Arthur Eld’s many jillies, or side-wives.) Born in the In-World Barony of New Canaan before the world moved on, Roland witnessed the destruction of his civilization and the death of his family and youthful friends. Although he still carries the sandalwood-handled guns of his forefathers—guns whose barrels were forged from Excalibur, the blade of Arthur Eld—Roland is a king without a kingdom. However, as a Warrior of the White, he still has a quest—he is destined to travel to the Dark Tower, that linchpin of the time/space continuum, and climb to the room at the top, where he will question the God or Force that resides there.

The first time we meet Roland is in The Gunslinger, the first novel of the Dark Tower series. In that book, Roland—whose homeland has already been destroyed—chases the Man in Black across Mid-Word’s wastelands.

During his search for his enemy, Roland visits the town of Tull, where he is opposed by Sylvia Pittston, a local preacher who also happens to be the Man in Black’s lover. In his final confrontation with Pittston’s followers, Roland kills all of the people of Tull, including his own lover, Alice. After leaving Tull, Roland wanders across the Mohaine Desert. At the Way Station—which is in actuality an abandoned coach house—Roland meets Jake Chambers, an eleven-year-old boy from our world who becomes his traveling companion. In the penultimate chapter of The Gunslinger, Roland sacrifices Jake so that he can finally overtake the Man in Black.

At the end of the novel, Roland and the Man in Black (who turns out to be a sorcerer named Walter), hold palaver in an ancient, bone-strewn golgotha on the shores of the Western Sea. Walter tells Roland’s fortune with a tarot pack of his own design. During this reading, Walter predicts the coming of Roland’s later companions—Eddie Dean (symbolized by the Tarot Card of the Prisoner) and Susannah Dean, represented by the Lady of Shadows. After Roland’s reading, Walter grants our hero a vision of the universe, and of the Dark Tower. After his vision, Roland falls into a sleep that lasts many years. When Roland awakes, he discovers that the Man in Black is a pile of bones and that he himself has grown much older. Our final glimpse of Roland is of him resting on the Shores of the Western Sea, gazing out at the water.
At the beginning of The Drawing of the Three, the second book of the Dark Tower series, Roland (who is asleep on the Western Sea’s beach) is attacked by a lobstrosity. This lobster-like monster eats two fingers from Roland’s right hand (including his trigger finger) and some of his toes. Roland manages to destroy his attacker, but this does not stop an infection (caused by the lobstrosity’s bite) from invading his system. Growing steadily sicker, Roland travels up the beach where he eventually finds three magic ironwood doors. Upon the first of these, written in the ancient letters of High Speech, are the words THE PRISONER. This doorway leads into the mind of Eddie Dean, a junkie from the where and when of New York, 1987.

When Roland first invades Eddie’s consciousness, the younger man is on a Nassau-to-New York drug run for the mobster Enrico Balazar. Transporting Eddie into Mid-World, Roland helps Eddie dump his stash (he is about to be caught by the police) and then returns to Eddie’s world to help him battle Balazar’s hardboys. After a shootout at Balazar’s headquarters and the death of Eddie’s brother (the great sage and eminent junkie, Henry Dean), Eddie returns to Mid-World with Roland. On the shores of the Western Sea, Eddie kicks his heroin habit and becomes Roland’s traveling companion.

The second beach door which Roland and Eddie encounter is called The Lady of Shadows. It leads into the where and when of New York, 1964, and into the mind of one woman with two personalities. Odetta Holmes and Detta Walker share a body but are very different women. While Odetta Holmes is a wealthy and educated person (she is the daughter of the famous black dentist and inventor, Dan Holmes), Detta is a streetwise, angry individual. Although Odetta and Detta live very separate lives in two different parts of New York, they share a wheelchair. (Their legs were amputated above the knee when they were pushed in front of an A train at Christopher Street Station.) Thanks to Roland, Detta and Odetta are forced to face each other. From their battle and eventual union arises the stronger and more vibrant personality of Susannah Dean, Eddie Dean’s lover and then wife.

The final beach door, called The Pusher, leads into the mind of Jack Mort, the psychopath who not only caused Susannah’s split personality (he dropped a brick on her head when she was five) and her fall in front of an A train, but who also catapulted Jake Chambers into Mid-World by pushing him in front of a 1976 Sedan de Ville. (Jake’s original doorway into Mid-World was called Death.) Already regretting his betrayal of Jake, Roland decides he will make amends. He stops Mort from killing Jake, and then—after using Mort’s body to fetch the antibiotics he needs to combat his own fever—throws Mort in front of the Christopher Street Station train where Mort had deprived Susannah of her legs.

Book Three of the Dark Tower series, entitled The Waste Lands, begins with Roland, Susannah, and Eddie battling a giant cyborg bear named Shardik. After Susannah shoots the radar dish on Shardik’s head and kills the raging beast (it had treed Eddie and was just about to remove him completely from our storyline), Roland tells his friends that the creature is actually one of the computerized Guardians, created by the Old Ones, to protect the six Beam Portals leading into and out of Mid-World. Following Shardik’s back trail, our tet uncovers the origin of the Bear-Turtle Beam, one of the six magnetic energy lines that hold Mid-World, and all the worlds, together. Realizing that this Beam will lead them directly to the Dark Tower, our friends decide to follow it.

But all is not well with Roland. When he saved Jake Chambers’ life in New York, 1977, he inadvertently created a split in the time/space continuum. As a result, both he and Jake (who is still in his own where and when) are suffering from a psychosis born of a double set of memories—one where Jake died, entered Mid-World, and met Roland, and one where he did not. With the help of his tet-mates, Eddie and Susannah, Roland draws Jake into Mid-World. Jake’s second Mid-World birth takes place on June 1, 1977, the day after he finds the magical vacant lot on Second Avenue and Forty-Sixth Street, and the magical Rose that grows there. It is also in The Waste Lands that our tet meets the billy-bumbler named Oy, who becomes Jake’s fast friend and a devoted member of Roland’s ka-tet.

Unlike the first three Dark Tower novels which take place in the present, the majority of Wizard and Glass recounts one of Roland’s most profoundly formative but painful experiences. It is the story of Roland’s coming of age battle against his mentor, Cort, and his subsequent journey to the Outer Arc town of Hambry, located in the Barony of Mejis. It is also the story of Roland’s doomed love affair with the beautiful but tragic Susan Delgado.

After being tricked into taking his all-or-nothing manhood test years too early (his mother’s lover, the wizard Marten Broadcloak, hoped Roland would fail and be sent west in disgrace) Roland becomes a wanted man. To save his son from the Affiliation’s enemies, Steven Deschain sends Roland to the backwater town of Hambry, located on the shores of the Clean Sea. Accompanied by his two friends and tet-mates, Cuthbert Allgood and Alain Johns, Roland soon discovers that Hambry is not the safe haven that his father thought it would be. The town’s headmen—whom the gunslingers had thought loyal to In-World and the Affiliation—are actually in the pockets of the Affiliation’s enemy, John Farson. Roland and his friends are determined to battle these traitors, even if it means losing their own lives in the process.

But while engaged in a complex game of false identities and half-truths with Hambry’s leaders, Roland meets and falls in love with Susan Delgado, a sixteen-year-old beauty whose maidenhead has already been promised to the town’s corrupt mayor. Roland embarks upon a secret affair with Susan, but their love is not destined to end happily. Roland and his friends battle Farson’s followers and secure Maerlyn’s Grapefruit for the Affiliation, but during their stand-off with Farson’s hard boys (known as the Big Coffin Hunters), Susan Delgado is taken hostage. Labeled a traitor to her town, she is burned to death upon a Charyou Tree fire. Part of Roland dies with her. During the journey back to Gilead, Roland’s mind is trapped within the evil Grapefruit. Roland is eventually freed, but once he returns to Gilead, tragedy strikes again. The wicked seeing sphere tricks Roland into murdering his own mother (who also happens to be a traitor), making him a matricide.

In the final three books of the Dark Tower series, Roland and his friends finally draw closer to their ultimate goal—the Dark Tower of End-World. In Wolves of the Calla, they battle the terrible robotic Wolves that gallop out of End-World every generation in order to steal the children of the Borderland Callas and harvest a telepathic chemical from their brains. In the Calla our friends meet Father Donald Frank Callahan, a priest from the town of Salem’s Lot, and welcome him into their tet.

In Song of Susannah, Susannah Dean’s body is hijacked by a phantom named Mia, who wants to mother the demonic child that Susannah unknowingly and unwillingly conceived—a child destined to become Roland’s executioner. Mia forces Susannah to travel to the Dixie Pig Restaurant, in New York, 1999, where the servants of the Crimson King await her. Taken hostage by the low man Richard P. Sayre (Vice-President of Sombra Corporation), Susannah is forced through a mechanical doorway that leads into an operating room in the Fedic Dogan. It is there, where so many Calla children had their brains drained of telepathic chemicals, that Mia gives birth to her deadly chap.

In The Dark Tower, our tet-mates battle their way through the Dixie Pig and then rescue Susannah from the Fedic Dogan. (Luckily, Susannah doesn’t need much rescuing. She has already killed the can-toi and vampires who held her hostage.) Together once more—though mourning the death of Father Callahan—Susannah, Eddie, Jake, Oy, and Roland travel to Algul Siento, the Crimson King’s prison for powerful psychics, whose power the Red King is harnessing to erode and destroy the Beams that support the Dark Tower.

But during their adventures in our world, Mid-World, and End-World, or tet-mates make a terrifying discovery. They are not ordinary mortals at all, but are characters in a series of books written by Stephen King. The name of that series? The Dark Tower!

In order to save themselves and their maker from the evil schemes of the Crimson King and in order to assure that the sacred Rose and the Dark Tower—linchpin of the time/space continuum—remain safe, Eddie and Roland lay the foundations of the Tet Corporation. This company, which is the antithesis of the Crimson King’s evil conglomerate known as Sombra, has three central objectives: protect Stephen King, protect the Rose, and screw Sombra whenever possible. To this day, Tet Corporation remains. It is Roland Deschain’s greatest gift to our world, and his final weapon against Sombra Corporation and their evil leader, the Crimson King.

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