Ka is a Wheel: The Tragic Cycle of Loss in the ‘Dark Tower’ Saga

I was a huge Stephen King kid. It was hard not to be where I grew up, on the coast of Maine, less than an hour from King’s homeland of Bangor, which was basically “the big city” where anybody went to do anything other than hiking or fishing. I literally cannot remember a time when I didn’t own most of King’s library. As a horror movie fan from the earliest age, it was great to love Stephen King adaptations, because there were pretty much no restrictions on them. Local parents seemed to collectively decide that anything by King was smarter and more adult, more refined than the usual class of horror film, so we could watch anything. I was traumatized by the likes of Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Creepshow, Pet Sematary and It by the time I was in third grade. Ironically enough, I would watch other horror movies and those King classics were still largely the ones that scared me most. Those were the ones that traumatized me.

Before we jump in, I should note that while I for the most part try to avoid major spoilers, it’s impossible not to spoil the context of some of these characters and their relationships with one another in the early books, as well as their backstories. So there are some spoilers for elements of the first four books simply in terms of character backstory and relationships. But I tried my best. Moving on.

I was in middle school when I attempted to read The Dark Tower for the first time. After all, I already owned the first four books in the series, there was really no reason not to try, even though I knew nothing about it. Except that I vaguely understood it was fantasy, just judging from the cover art. I made it all the way through the first book, didn’t love it, and so that was it for a long time. I even attended a reading at the University of Maine where I watched King read from the then-upcoming Wolves of the Calla and that still didn’t push me to jump back in. It really wasn’t until college that I tried again. At that point, in no time at all, I feel in love. I felt changed by the time I came to the end of the seventh book, as if I had gone through an entire journey, lived an entire life side-by-side with these fictional characters, and I kind of had. As someone who had never been a Lord of the Rings fan, I had always sort of longed for the experience that its diehard fans got out of that trilogy, and with The Dark Tower I felt like I finally had. That was my fantasy epic. My personal history with it is far from the only one. From what I’ve seen over the years, a lot of people try the first book, don’t like it and wait years to pick the series back up. Ironically, after all this time, I’m actually quite fond of the first novel and think it makes for a great introduction to the series, centering on and establishing Roland, the gunslinger, himself before weaving that ever-widening tapestry around him.

Like many, I got back into the series because I heard it was King’s magnum opus that connected all of his other works, bringing in characters, narratives and sometimes entire worlds from some of the author’s best. As someone who had read plenty of other King books, that was instantly appealing. That’s what grabbed, frankly, everyone I’ve ever known who gave finally took the plunge and read the books. Those connections are there, it absolutely does do all the things people say it does in terms of bringing in those worlds and characters, don’t get me wrong. King absolutely loves his references. But those things are simply not what The Dark Tower is ultimately about, as a series.

Sure, the Dark Tower is about navigating a larger universe, universes, even, and trying to make it make sense. For me, though, it is also, above all else, about the tragic cycles of life and death. The main characters of the saga are defined by loss and Roland, being the central figure, is defined by it most of all. Roland lost everything, long ago, and he’s been in search of the Tower ever since. Eddie would be riddled with bullets or OD’d. Susannah would be splattered. Jake has known death more than a boy ever should, and more than once. All of them would have died without Roland. Jake has died at least once because of Roland, and he knows it could happen again, they all do, because they know what the Tower means to Roland, especially because that’s what it starts to mean to them all. But life only moves in one direction and only ends one way. That’s how life works. Each of them know the likelihood that they will almost definitely die in their attempt to reach the Dark Tower, and yet they push on, unwavering. Because maybe they can make it make sense. Maybe they can know why. Maybe they can finally understand the meaning of all this loss that has defined each of their lives, and maybe that is the Tower.

In that, the Dark Tower basically represents hope. At no point, particularly in the early stages of the series, do they ever actually know if they’ll get there or not, but they hold onto the hope of the Tower. It is something to keep them going when they, in the case of every character, have nothing left but each other. The search for the Tower, of course, is the thing that brings them together, that heals them and gives each of them the family they never had. This is most literal in the case of Eddie and Susannah, who actually marry one another. This core group of characters, this ka-tet is more than simply a “group of people bound by fate” as the term describes. They are a family, and in each other they have actually found everything they seem to be searching for, but the tragedy of each character is that they can’t always recognize that or truly believe it, deep down. Roland can’t believe it at all, because the Tower is too much of an obsession for him. He knows exactly what and who he has sacrificed in pursuit of it.

While major elements of Roland’s backstory were revealed in the first few books, it’s really the fourth book, Wizard and Glass, that tells us everything. Roland was practically raised from birth to be a gunslinger, to be a noble warrior and protector of the people of Gilead, even in a world that is moving on, becoming less of itself, when protectors may not matter against the ravages of time. His father is stern, his mother is distant, and their relationship with one another is as cold as a corpse. Young Roland respected his father and had no problem leaping toward violence to defend his mother’s honor, but it’s pretty clear that he raised himself. He’s tasked with basically proving his manhood and his status as gunslinger at the ripe old age of fourteen, and in that time falls in love with a girl who later dies horrifically while declaring her love for him as her last words.

These are obvious spoilers for the main character’s backstory, but they are crucial for understanding him and how his journey relates to that central theme of loss throughout the saga. Knowing what Roland has been through and where he has come from it is both easy and obvious to see why he has difficulty getting close to people. Why he holds them at arm’s length and doesn’t let them in. The girl he loved died brutally screaming that she loved him and now no one will ever have full access to his heart again.

The boy Jake goes from being like a son to Roland to basically just being his son, with both of them recognizing their roles as son and father. Both of them also have to live with the fact that when they first met, when they first formed that bond and traveled together, Roland was asked to choose between his pursuit of the Tower and this boy’s life, and he chose the Tower. He killed Jake. Jake is living his life as a child for the third time, already on borrowed time and he knows it. The fact that Roland did that is not the core of the strain on their relationship throughout the series, though. The ultimate wedge between them, throughout each of the books, is that neither of them can say for certain that Roland would not do it again.

That’s the fear at the core of Roland. He gave himself over to this obsession when he was barely a teenager and it is the only thing that defines him as a grown man. What if it’s too late for those familial connections? What if the things that keep him cold and cut off are things he can never overcome? What he’s never the person he needs to be for Jake? What if he could live this life a thousand times over and never overcome these things and always get the people around him killed? To put it as simply as possible, what if that hole in his heart is a thing that no amount of time, no amount of love, or purpose, could ever heal?

Just as life and death are a repeated cycle, ka is a wheel. Jake, a boy grown up too fast with a strained relationship with his father, is basically beginning Roland’s life anew, which is probably the last thing either of them want. Death, and how it is reflected in the Tower, represents something different for Jake than any of the other characters in the books. The others have all lived longer than Jake has, and therefore its only natural that they have lost more. If the Dark Tower is the promise of finally understanding the why of it all, with the ultimate question being why all of this death, and for what purpose? Jake is the only one truly asking that question for himself. He’s not wondering why he’s been made to mourn so much, been given so much to grieve, the way the others have. Jake knows death more intimately than any child ever should. The question at the core of his character is: why me?

By the time he is established as a core character in the series as a whole, Jake Chambers has already died twice. Jake died in his own world and instead of an afterlife and any kind of peace, he was dropped into Roland’s, where he died again. His path intersects with Roland’s again when Roland comes to save him in New York, before his tragic accident which turned out to be a random, passionless act of murder. Jake died for no reason and even when he gets his life back after the accident is prevented, he cannot live a free and full life unscarred by it, because the universe, or ka, won’t let him. And it delivers him right back to the father who murdered him, but also sets him on his journey toward purpose, and to the family he’d always wanted.

Eddie Dean is often the voice of reason, as well as the sometimes comic relief, frequently offering a sarcastic remark on the sheer absurdity of their situation. He’s quick to quip, but he is just as defined by loss as the characters around him. He knew death. And even though he didn’t seek it out, he certainly understood the inevitability of it, even if he would rarely admit it. Eddie was a heroin addict before meeting Roland set him on the path to the Dark Tower. He was drug running for guys that were in deep. He was on a plane when Roland hijacked his mind and possessed his body and if not for Roland’s interjection, he would have died several times over. His life was ticking down by the seconds. Roland helped him turn that around and more than any of the other characters, Eddie truly got to live thanks to his quest for the Tower.

Meeting Roland, joining his ka-tet, it led Eddie to get clean, it led him to his wife, it led him to relationships that, while not always healthy, were certainly healthier than any he had ever known. But at the same time, Eddie had a deep attachment to (even hero worship for) his abusive brother, who got him hooked on heroin. He looked up to the man who led him to a destructive obsession as a role model and, in the ever-repeating cycle, that does parallel his relationship with Roland in some uncomfortable ways.

Susannah is perhaps the most fascinating of all, because she wasn’t even really born before the quest for the Tower. Her mind was chaos thanks to her dissociative identity disorder. She had a life, of course, though. Susannah was a Black woman living in New York City in the early ‘60s. Loss was simply what she lived because she was never granted the opportunity to win, that wasn’t in the cards for a woman like her. She is also the first one who kept losing after Roland came into her life. Outside of the fact that all of them left their worlds behind even though they would almost certainly have died, Susannah lost her legs the day she met Roland. Then she lost her alternate personalities, the alters of the calm Odetta Holmes and the violent and deadly Detta Walker finally confronted each other and merged, combining those traits and allowing Susannah Odetta Holmes to be born. She had to kill the woman she had been to become transformed into the woman she could be.

What’s especially interesting about Susannah is that you would think her relationship with Eddie would be restricting, as she was a woman who was always defined by those around her, even by the alters inside her own mind, but if anything it did the exact opposite. Her relationship with Eddie never relegates her to the sidelines, her caring for the group never makes her the mother figure, her dissociative identity disorder never makes her a liability and the loss of her legs never makes her helpless. Susannah is the warrior of the group, the sharp-shooter, the deadliest among them, perhaps someday even more than Roland himself. She is the first one to train to become a gunslinger, even when it is accepted that Roland has long been the last of them, and the first of the group that he bestows with that title. Each of them are renewed in some way by the quest for the Tower. Each of them are strengthened by the bonds they form with each other, but none more than Susannah, who is truly reborn.

The Dark Tower comics introduced a fascinating character named Aileen Ritter. She knew Roland when he was young, around the time of the flashbacks in Wizard and Glass, and wanted more than anything to be a gunslinger, but was forbidden. She ignored this and trained on her own, giving herself the title of gunslinger when no one would give it to her. She bears striking similarities to Susannah, not only because she’s a female gunslinger, mostly because she created herself and took total authority over deciding exactly who she was going to be. This addition to the mythos, this character from long before Susannah entered the story, only reaffirms the central notion that ka is a wheel, time is a never-ending cycle, the past is the present is the future. Those comics were without a doubt at their best when they expanded the mythology in ways like this.

There is, in terms of the plot, a clear purpose to the pursuit of the Dark Tower. It is the nexus point of all realities, it is threatened by an entity known as the Crimson King with followers throughout all times and places of all realities. Its destruction will unmake existence, period. It means not only the end of the world, but of every world. These are the archetypes of fantasy storytelling, which is another thing King regularly comments on through the series as it goes. But that’s not the why for each of these characters. Even textually, Roland admits that’s not why he, personally, is so relentless in seeking the Tower. He doesn’t have a reason, nothing he can explain with words. None of them really do.

None of them know what they are going to find when they reach it. But for each of them, I think it represents meaning. Not the meaning of life, but the meaning of death, because even as they find a family with one another and build new bonds, it is everything they have lost that pushes them forward. The inability to realize that is the ultimate tragedy of The Dark Tower. It’s true for no character more than Roland. It is his obsession that he roped each of them into, and it may very well get them all killed. And he can’t promise himself or them that he would not let that happen. After all, if ka is a wheel, Eddie, Susannah and Jake remind him of his first ka-tet, his first group of friends, all of whom died.

Nothing drives that character more than the fear that he will never let himself love them enough to prevent that happening, that he will never let them get too close to him or he too close to them to fill the hole inside that he believes only the Dark Tower can fill. From the moment we meet him, Roland needs to pursue something. It starts off with the Man in Black even more than the Tower itself. He does it simply because he needs a reason to keep moving forward, to keep himself going, and no matter how many people he surrounds himself with, he does it alone. That’s the ultimate tragedy of Roland’s character. He is marching toward his own death and he knows it and he welcomes it, but all it has ever done is get everyone around him killed instead.

Yes, The Dark Tower connects the worlds of so many Stephen King works. As a huge fan of Salem’s Lot, of course I was delighted to see that novel’s runaway preacher become a major part of the latter books of the series. And yes, it is on its own a powerfully compelling fantasy epic. For me, though, more than anything, it is a magnum opus centering so precisely on how people are defined by loss. Its central question is almost impossible to answer and that’s what makes it so compelling: “Can a heart ever be truly healed if the person will never be fully willing to let that happen?” The books are essentially about this from the very beginning, and weave beautifully between both possible answers, and lead the reader to come to their own conclusions, as all great stories do. The Dark Tower is a journey of countless lives and deaths, the versions of ourselves we kill to create new ones, the lives that begin anew when we embark on new relationships. It is as profound as it is weird and grisly and crude and sometimes downright silly.

For its overwhelming length, it is a series that even now I can pick back up and jump into at a moment’s notice, and it’s like I never left and almost like I’m reading it for the first time all over again. Because the stories we tell, we are always telling, and nothing ever begins or ends, it comes around again when the time is right. It just keeps going. Ka is a wheel.