Tracing The Trails Of The King : The Gunslinger
FAIR WARNING – if you have not read this book, there will likely be spoilers contained within this piece. This is the ninth essay in my ongoing series on Stephen King, and is intended to be a free discussion of the book. I cannot be held responsible if I inadvertently ruin the ending for you, so if you think this might apply to you, I would encourage you to turn back now.
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The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
– Stephen King, The Gunslinger
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In the literary scope of things, in the history of one-liners, of opening salvos that hook deeper than you had ever thought possible, this one might be at the top of the list. The quest of quests, the epic of 
epics. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve gone down the road alongside Roland Deschain and his band of fellow gunslingers, and this was the one that started it all. Originally published in serialized form, this consolidated book represents the first steps of a massive literary journey, the epicenter of Stephen King’s fictional universe.
The Dark Tower.
The very words are enough to bring out a reaction in pretty much every King fan, either from those who worship the books as the centerpiece of their table of addictions, or to simply shrug and admit that it just isn’t for them. It’s on the tip of the tongue of many a hard core King fan whenever they come across fellow constant readers.
Have you read the Dark Tower?
But in the beginning, with this first book, things were simpler, placed on a much smaller scale in terms of its relation with the rest of King’s universe. I think that this book could almost be viewed as a preface to the proper narrative of the Dark Tower, an introduction to this tragically flawed character, and daring you to root for him. But more on that later.
I have often been curious as to how much of the Dark Tower saga was present in King’s consciousness when he wrote this book. Did he know where the story was leading? Did he have a destination locked in his head, but with no idea how long it was going to take to get there? It would take decades following the release of this book when the saga would finally be completed and at that point, King went back and re-released a revised version of The Gunslinger, altering some minor aspects of the book in order to make it feel like it was more of a part of the overall story. Without going into a lot of detail, the changes he makes leads me to believe that when this book was originally written, he may have had some vague sense of where the story was going, but that a lot of it was unrealized, locked up inside of his unconsciousness.
Roland is the perfect anti-hero, and while it is clear that he is courageous, I often find myself asking if he can really be described as being heroic. I have felt for some time that the best kind of fictional characters are those who challenge you and Roland definitely fits this requirement. As the series approached its end, Stephen King made the decision to write himself into the books as a character. In one appearance, the character Stephen King admits that when he originally wrote the Gunslinger, he didn’t like Roland, was afraid of him. I don’t know if that was true or if he was simply creating a version of himself as a way of highlighting the importance of the books in relation to the rest of his catalog. Part of me likes to think though, that in a very real way, Stephen King was afraid of this literary character he had stumbled across.
In the course of this project, I made the decision to read the original version of this book, as it was published in the beginning. Any of you who may have been following this series might be wanting to point out to me that several books ago, when it came time to read the Stand, I chose to read the unabridged version which wouldn’t be published until much later, instead of the originally released book. Yes, I realize that I’m being somewhat of a hypocrite but I take these decisions on a case by case basis, and my reasons for choosing this version was the same as my reasons for choosing the more current version of The Stand. It was the version I read first, and it is the version I am the most attached to.
It was nice to get the original language of the book, the sense of Roland as a fairly different character than he becomes in the rest of the series. It seemed like King was trying to wrap his mind around this enigma of a man, his history and how that led to his present and how his decisions will affect where he ends up, wherever the end of his path might lie.
The Gunslinger is a brutal book. Roland is not necessarily a just character who always does what is righteous and good. He makes decisions that are morally questionable at best, and he does them with no clear suggestion or indication of what he is even trying to accomplish. He is in pursuit of the enigmatic Man In Black, but he himself often seems like a plague of violence, let loose on the world around him. He certainly seems to stride through the world, leaving behind a wake of blood and death.
The opening sequence of this book can be a little hard to track, with a flashback occurring within a flashback, but Roland’s story of what happens in the town of Tull grabs the reader right away, and sets a chilling tone for the entire series. He moves on from this, and after nearly perishing in the desert, comes to the boy Jake. His relationship takes on an almost paternal quality as the story proceeds to pitch downward toward inevitable tragedy. Roland is a man on the pursuit of a noble quest, who happens to not always do noble things along the way. He is an incredibly complex character and one of my favorites out of all the books I have read, not just Stephen King.
The Gunslinger is a short book, but it is fantastic to behold. One thing that struck me as I read this was just how amazingly versatile King is. For as much as people make of him as “only” a horror writer, to be able to, after a long string of books centered around children or other characters with paranormal abilities, it is impressive that he was able to simply hop to a completely different genre, and produce work such as this. I think it just goes to show that good writing crosses all genres, and that it shouldn’t matter what label we can put on the story, so long as we love the writer that is doing it.
I have often seen Roland as a kind of metaphor for Constant Reader, making his way through this immense universe of books and stories and characters, constantly pursuing just one more narrative, one more “once upon a time”.
Put simply, the word-slinger fled across the desert, and I followed.
My name is Chad Clark, and I am proud to be a Constant Reader.
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