What is the Dark Tower?

Having recently finished the third book in the Dark Tower series, The Wasteleands, I want to make some informal, but English major-y, comments on the series thus far.

What is the Dark Tower? It is rare that there is such an obvious symbol in a decent book. Clearly, the Tower is supposed to stand for something, just like the whale in Moby-Dick has easily observable symbolic value (I am not comparing these two works, mind you). Yet, the meaning of the Tower has not yet been delineated, leaving readers to project their favorite subjects onto the Tower. And that's precisely what I am prepared to do.

But before getting to the Tower, I want to spend a moment on the characters. I have an idea that the Tower draws out certain characteristics in the individuals under its sway. Of course, everyone and everything in Mid-World is in one way or another "a servant of the Tower". Specifically what I am talking about is the duality that is accentuated in all the characters with which we are familiar:

Roland: on one hand he is the Arthurian knight, invincable, inhuman, and driven by incomprehensible forces and willing to sacrifice anyone in order to reach the Tower. Yet Roland is also the healer and teacher. He risks his life for those he has "drawn" into Mid-World, and though he is the informal leader of the group, he also knows he is a pawn in the Tower's game.

Eddie: in Eddie's case, there is the Eddie of before and after. Before his drawing, he is a heroin addict, but he is also imprisoned by his past, unable to escape the shadow of his failure brother. After his drawing, Eddie is able to come into his own, to find his stregth and talent.

Susannah: the most obvious case. She is literally two people trapped in the same body, one a 1960s civil rights activist, one a psychopath.

Jake: is in a way both dead and alive. Understanding and confronting his duality is Jake's major narrative arc in the first three books of the series.

So I think in part of the Tower is about duality and separation; this can be set against the concept of "ka-tet", or a fate that brings certain groups together, another reoccurring theme. But what do we really know about the Tower? Of course, we can see that Freud would suggest that the Tower is phallic, and I would add that it is supposed to be surrounded by a field of roses, also potent sexual symbols. However, the book is not heavy on sexual tension (though it does contain some sex scenes) and I think it would be difficult to go much further down that road. We know that everything serves the Tower in a way, even to the extent that plantlife tends to lean toward the Tower and compasses point to it.

I think one area worth exploring might be the Tower's relationship with technology. Those that have read The Stand already have some insight into King's thought on what technology does to society. Mid-World is filled with the husks of its high technology past. Some machines still work profitably, but there are others that are unexpectedly malevolent or ominous, including the strange train in this volume that is slowly going insane after hundreds of years of being worshiped by ignorant dwellers of a burnt out city, living in abandoned missile silos. It's not clear what happened to Mid-World, but it seems like some kind of very large scale nuclear war may have demolished the world. The technology that remains is sometimes useful, but almost always dangerous, too.

It's also the case the Mid-World is somehow expanding. The old maps show a much smaller world than the one that now exists. A journey that used to take a year, now takes 20. I would add that this might build on the theme that the Tower is a force that separates us and makes it more difficult to interact. Time is also unpredicable in Mid-World, and it seems likely that we will eventually learn that the Tower has some connection to the way people experience space and time, and may in fact be capable of being a doorway to other worlds.

This is all just speculation--the sort of thing I might think about before falling asleep at night. But I will say that The Wastelands is the most engaging of the books in this series thus far. It is far from perfect and I do not believe the Dark Tower to be King's best work, but I am relatively engrossed all the same. And if you're read T.S. Eliot, there are some inside jokes in this volume for you. I will show you fear in a handful of dust. I like that quote.