Differences in interpretation of The Dark Tower and How King Might have Missed the Point

A qualifying statement must be made before I move forward with this essay. I have enjoyed King’s The Dark Tower. It had its stops and starts but King was able to craft a wonderful quest fantasy rich with locales and characters.

Browning’s work, birthed from a nightmare, could be interpreted in a few different ways, as most excellent poetry should. We know, based on statements from King, that he was inspired by Browning’s poem to embark on this huge seven book journey about The Gunslinger and his quest for the Dark Tower. Roland’s quest in King’s books and the Roland in Browning’s poem share similarities in who they are, what their motivation is, and how they view the world. Though there are close similarities, the Roland of Browning’s creation affects his environment as well as the people around him more so than King’s Roland. King’s Roland may affect his companions through out the epic, usually with negative outcomes since Roland’s single motivation is gaining the Tower and any damage he causes to other people is collateral damage and not necessarily important to him. But this affect is not made by Roland but simply caused by him with no deeper meaning other than his single mindedness to make it to the Tower.

But King’s Roland does not affect his surroundings. We are shown that Roland’s world in King’s Dark Tower has already moved on. It is already in decay. Roland blames the outside forces for this decay and the possible destruction of the Tower as the main reason the “world has moved on.” To him, The Dark Tower is the center of existence and must be preserved in order to preserve reality. To King’s Roland, he is not the cause of how his world is perceived, but the savior of a dying world. To King’s Roland, The Crimson King is the antagonist to reality and bent on destroying the Tower. King’s Roland isn’t tied to the Tower.  As Roland begins to fall apart mentally and physically King neglects to merge him and the Tower together.  Showing that they are one and the same.  Roland only sees the Tower failing because of external forces and not his own internal breakdown.

We see something different in Browning’s Roland.  Browning’s Roland has an affect on his world.  The way he views the world makes it decay and “move on”. Harold Bloom states (I’m paraphrasing here from memory) that the Childe Roland in the poem embodies the world he inhabits and that his actions directly affect how the world turns out. Where King’s Roland conflict is external, Brownings Roland conflict is internal.  Which in turn changes how one would approach the poem and the book series.

With The Dark Tower, we read it to find out if the protagonists succeed in their quest.  Though many of the characters have introspective times and grow during the quest, the Dark Tower, at its surface, is a quest story.  Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, is not a quest story.  It is purely introspective.  We don’t care if Roland gets to the tower, because we ultimately know the ending when he does. We are more concerned and intrigued by Roland’s viewpoint and his change or lack of change throughout the poem.

This is where King may have missed a deeper reading into the poem.  Much like Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, Child Roland to the Dark Tower Came can be read superficially as a epic quest poem that lends itself to a grand adventure tale.  But reading Child Roland, and Rhyme for that matter, only for the surface and not for deeper meaning does a disservice to the reader and ultimately to the work.

King’s Dark Tower suffers from his examination of the external more so than the internal.  If King had concentrated on looking at how Roland could be, and in all intents and purposes,  should be the reason that the world is moving on, it would have made a deeper and richer story and would have saved King from inserting blatant pop culture in the final books.  Which completely negated any deeper reading of the series after book four.

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