The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger

Considering the protagonist, Roland the gunslinger, is most accurately described as an anti-hero, whose sense of morality is never clearly defined, the novel never really becomes about good versus evil. Instead, it navigates the middle ground between good and evil, asking the reader to question what’s right and wrong. Roland’s youth is a good demonstration of this idea. Even though he comes from Gilead, a medieval land similar to the times of King Arthur, there is no sense of chivalry. Instead, gunslingers, Gilead’s version of knights, are ruthlessly trained through beating and patronizing language. Then, after that training, the only way for the boy to officially become a gunslinger is for the boy to beat his teacher to a bloody pulp. Furthermore, it’s implied that the gunslinger ends up killing his mother, given the brief reference to him being a matricide, but it’s never fully explained. This intense violence early on in the gunslinger’s life, along with his lack of emotional reaction to the violence,establishes him as a morally-ambiguous character; that is, even though for much of the novel the gunslinger is chasing the Man in Black, a presumably evil character, the gunslinger can never himself be called good, making the reader question who is really good and who is really evil by the end, if such binaries exist in the world of the novel.