Page 65 (1/2)
THE FINAL ARGUMENT
Wolves of the Calla is the fifth volu's narrative poe of Susannah, was published in 2004 The seventh and last, The Dark Toas published later that same year
The first voluer, tells how Roland Deschain of Gilead pursues and at last catches Walter, the man in black--he who pretended friendship with Roland's father but actually served the Cri the half-human Walter is for Roland a step on the way to the Dark Tohere he hopes the quickening destruction of Mid-World and the slow death of the Beams may be halted or even reversed The subtitle of this novel is RESUMPTION
The Dark Tower is Roland's obsession, his grail, his only reason for living e meet him We learn of how Marten tried, when Roland was yet a boy, to see hiame Roland, however, lays Marten's plans at nines, mostly due to his choice of weapon in his manhood test
Steven Deschain, Roland's father, sends his son and two friends (Cuthbert Allgood and Alain Johns) to the seacoast barony of Mejis, mostly to place the boy beyond Walter's reach There Roland ado, who has fallen afoul of a witch Rhea of the Coos is jealous of the girl's beauty, and particularly dangerous because she has obtained one of the great glass balls known as the Bends o' the Rainbowor the Wizard's Glasses There are thirteen of these in all, theBlack Thirteen Roland and his friends have h they escape with their lives (and the pink Bend o' the Rainbow), Susan Delgado, the lovely girl at the , is burned at the stake This tale is told in the fourth volume, Wizard and Glass The subtitle of this novel is REGARD
In the course of the tales of the Toe discover that the gunslinger's world is related to our own in fundamental and terrible ways The first of these links is revealed when Jake, a boy from the New York of 1977,years after the death of Susan Delgado There are doors between Roland's world and our own, and one of them is death Jake finds hi pushed into Forty-third Street and run over by a car The car's driver was a man named Enrico Balazar The pusher was a criminal sociopath named Jack Mort, Walter's representative on the New York level of the Dark Tower
Before Jake and Roland reach Walter, Jake dies againthis ti choice between this symbolic son and the Dark Tower, chooses the Tower Jake's last words before plunging into the ab
yss are "Go, then--there are other worlds than these"
The final confrontation between Roland and Walter occurs near the Western Sea In a long night of palaver, the e device Three cards--the Prisoner, the Lady of Shadows, and Death ("but not for you, gunslinger")--are especially called to Roland's attention
The Drawing of the Three, subtitled RENEWAL, begins on the shore of the Western Sea not long after Roland awakens froer is attacked by a horde of carnivorous "lobstrosities," and before he can escape, he has lost two fingers of his right hand and has been seriously infected Roland resuh he is sick and possibly dying
On his walk he encounters three doors standing freely on the beach These open into New York at three different whens From 1987, Roland draws Eddie Dean, a prisoner of heroin From 1964, he draws Odetta Susannah Hols when a sociopath named Jack Mort pushed her in front of a subway train She is the Lady of Shadoith a violent "other" hidden in her brain This hidden woman, the violent and crafty Detta Walker, is deterer draws her into Mid-World
Roland thinks that perhaps he has drawn three in just Eddie and Odetta, since Odetta is really two personalities, yet when Odetta and Detta ely thanks to Eddie Dean's love and courage), the gunslinger knows it's not so He knows sohts of Jake, the boy who spoke of other worlds at the time of his death
The Waste Lands, subtitled REDEMPTION, begins with a paradox: to Roland, Jake seems both alive and dead In the New York of the late 1970s, Jake Chambers is haunted by the saantic bear named either Mir (so called by the old people ent in fear of it) or Shardik (by the Great Old Ones who built it), Roland, Eddie, and Susannah backtrack the beast and discover the Path of the Beam known as Shardik to Maturin, Bear to Turtle There were once six of these Beaes of Mid-World At the point where the Beams cross, at the center of Roland's world (and all worlds), stands the Dark Tower, the nexus of all where and when
By now Eddie and Susannah are no longer prisoners in Roland's world In love and well on the way to becoers themselves, they are full participants in the quest and follow Roland, the last seppe-sai (death-seller), along the Path of Shardik, the Way of Maturin
In a speaking ring not far from the Portal of the Bear, time is mended, paradox is ended, and the real third is drawn Jake reenters Mid-World at the end of a perilous rite where all four--Jake, Eddie, Susannah, and Roland--remember the faces of their fathers and acquit the after, the quartet becomes a quintet, when Jake befriends a billy-buer, raccoon, and dog, have a li ability Jake names his new friend Oy
The way of the pilgrienerate survivors of two old factions carry on an endless conflict Before reaching the city, in the little town of River Crossing, they nize Roland as a fellow survivor of those days before the world moved on, and honor him and his companions The Old People also tell them of a monorail train whichthe Path of the Beam and toward the Dark Tower
Jake is frightened by this news but not surprised; before being drawn from New York, he obtained two books fro name of Calvin Tower One is a book of riddles with the answers torn out The other, Charlie the Choo-Choo, is a children's story with dark echoes of Mid-World For one thing, the word charin Gilead
Aunt Talitha, the ives Roland a silver cross to wear, and the travelers go their course While crossing the dilapidated bridge which spans the River Send, Jake is abducted by a dying (and very dangerous) outlaw naround to the Tick-Tock Man, the last leader of the faction known as the Grays
While Roland and Oy go after Jake, Eddie and Susannah find the Cradle of Lud, where Blaine the Mono awakes Blaine is the last aboveground tool of a vast computer syste interest: riddles It promises to take the travelers to the monorail's final stopif they can pose it a riddle it cannot solve Otherwise, Blaine says, their trip will end in death: charyou tree
Roland rescues Jake, leaving the Tick-Tock Man for dead Yet Andrew Quick is not dead Half-blind, hideously wounded about the face, he is rescued by a man who calls himself Richard Fannin Fannin, however, also identifies hier, a demon of whom Roland has been warned
The pilgri city of Lud, this ti thefarther and farther behind them will make no difference one way or the other when the pink bullet ju the Path of the Beaht hundred miles an hour Their one chance of survival is to pose Blaine a riddle which the computer cannot answer