The Drawing of the Three

“‘Three. This is the number of your fate.’

‘Three?’

‘Yes, three is mystic. Three stands at the heart of the mantra.’”

Enigmatic and evocative statements like these help create intrigue and build suspense. The opening lines of Part 1 immediately establish the importance of three companions; what Roland doesn’t yet know is that he himself is the third who completes the fellowship.

“In the service of duty there was never any acceptable reason for denial.”

Roland must immediately get to work when he awakens after the lobstrosity attack. He may be weak from blood loss and pain, but he knows he must keep moving in order to survive and continue his quest. The reminder he gives himself reflects his training as a gunslinger and his relentless nature.

“I jerk off left-handed, he thought, at least that’s something.”

Other characters often describe Roland as stern and humorless, but this bawdy observation shows he’s capable of a laugh at his own expense, revealing a depth of character hidden intentionally behind stoicism.

“‘I’ll see what I can rustle up.’

Russel? The gunslinger thought dazedly. In his own world to russel was a slang verb meaning to take a woman by force. Never mind. Food would come.”

Roland’s encounters with Eddie’s world of 1987 lead to many comical situations. They also highlight specific features of Roland’s world. Here, Roland’s inability to understand the word “rustle” adds humor and highlights how different his language is from that of the readers’ English.

“I don’t know how they came by their knowledge, and it doesn’t matter. One of them told the drivers. The drivers will tell whatever priests perform this ceremony, this Clearing of Customs.”

Another example of Roland’s unfamiliarity with Eddie’s world, this quote infuses humor into the scene. Magic and ritual dominate Roland’s culture, and because Eddie places such importance on clearing Customs, Roland assumes that it must be a great rite.

“For another, he was Roland. If dying was required, he intended to die as Roland. He intended to die crawling toward the Tower, if that was what was required. Then the odd harsh practicality that lived beside the romantic in his nature like a tiger with a roe reasserted itself. There was no need to think of dying with the experiment not yet made.”

This passage sheds great light on Roland’s character. In Eddie’s body, Roland is tempted for a split second to abandon his own sick and pain-wracked form in the beach world. However, the very thought is repugnant to him because it isn’t noble. Roland, the gunslinger, must live and die as himself. Even as Roland is being fanciful, the practical part of him pops up, asking him to act rather than think. The simile of the tiger and the roe deer explicitly compares the practical and romantic Roland to inherently different creatures. Both these aspects reside in Roland and lead to many of the dilemmas he faces.

“The gunslinger thought this man, prisoner or not, was probably better at the fine art of survival than any other men he had seen in the air-carriage.”

The people Roland recruits for his ka-tet, or fellowship of destiny, must be worthy of the enormous mission; though Eddie is young and has a complex backstory, Roland can immediately see Eddie’s potential. This shows Roland’s ability to gauge a character and establishes Eddie as a character to reckon with.

“Glass gleamed mellowly everywhere, more glass in this one room than he had seen in all the years since his childhood, when supply lines had begun to break down, partially because of interdicting raids carried out by the rebel forces of Farson, the Good Man, but mostly, he thought, simply because the world was moving on.”

Passages like this provide context clues and references to Roland’s backstory. While Roland’s world has guns and coffee, it’s technologically far behind the readers’ world. Additionally, Roland’s memory of glass when he was a boy suggests that Mid-World was once prosperous but has since declined. The phrase “moving on” in Mid-World English means to decline, which is somewhat opposite of its familiar meaning. Rather than implying journeying and progressing, the phrase “moving on” to Roland implies a decay.

“‘What’s ka?’ Eddie’s voice was truculent. ‘I never heard of it. Except if you say it twice you come out with the baby word for shit.’”

Eddie’s voice adds a note of irreverence to the somber proceedings. While ka is an exalted concept for Roland, Eddie makes a scatological joke out of it. While bleakly funny, Eddie’s rejoinder to Roland also shows that the quest for the Dark Tower isn’t as important for everyone as it is for Roland. Eddie thus acts as a foil for Roland, against which Roland loses some of his sense of self-importance.

“Yet part of her protested, horrified. In a world which had become a nuclear powder keg upon which nearly a billion people now sat, it was a mistake—perhaps of suicidal proportions—to believe there was a difference between good and bad shooters.”

Odetta’s statement begins an important conversation about violence. While it’s tempting to counter bad violence with good violence, definitions of good and bad can be subjective. In such a case, anybody can feel justified in using guns for what they think is the right cause. Odetta’s philosophy directly opposes Roland’s, which distinguishes between good, protective violence and bad, unnecessary violence. When Roland clinically finishes off Mort at the end of the book, he’s convinced about the rightness of his violence. Odetta’s statement foreshadows her soon becoming herself a gunslinger, the very thing she considers problematic.

“A trying three days. Well, that was one way to put it. Another might be that her three days in Oxford, Mississippi had been a short season in hell. But there were some things you couldn’t say. Some things you would die before saying.”

Odetta’s reflection on her time in Oxford, Mississippi, reveals more by withholding information. The horrors she witnessed are unspeakable and break the bounds of belief. While the reflection offers important social context about Odetta’s life and time, it also shows that Odetta tends to bottle up certain bits of information while being voluble about others.

“If you have given up your heart for the Tower, Roland, you have already lost. A heartless creature is a loveless creature, and a loveless creature is a beast.”

These lines reveal the dilemma that Roland faces when it comes to opening his heart. That these lines occur in the context of Roland witnessing Eddie and Odetta fall in love shows that Roland feels left out. Because his heart and all his attention belong to the quest for the Dark Tower, Roland must choose the quest above anything else, including those he loves, like Jake Chambers. Roland would rather be a beast than love someone only to cast them aside.

“When she said his name his arms prickled.”

Eddie falling in love with Odetta over the course of a day may seem sudden, but the extreme situation in which these characters find themselves provides context that makes their strong emotions understandable. Although the plot doesn’t linger on the development of the relationship, the writing captures the initial rush of love, such as in Eddie’s thought here. The love between Eddie and Odetta also serves as a respite from the plot’s urgency and stress.

“A child doesn’t understand a hammer until he’s mashed his finger at a nail. Get up and stop whining, maggot! You have forgotten the face of your father!”

Roland realizes that he must teach Eddie about life the way Cort taught him: through making his own mistakes. The expressive voice of Cort delivers the message home and conveys the masculine code that governs the gunslingers. Tough love is considered preferable to revealing any emotion—hence, the term “maggot”—and honor and tradition is always attached to fathers. Expressions like “You have forgotten the face of your father” imply that one has lost one’s traditions and honorable ways. Thus, the text reveals that the gunslinger ethos is patriarchal.

“She’s a gunslinger as sure as Eddie is one.”

As Detta loads a gun and points it at Eddie for the first time, Roland can’t help but admire her ease with the weapon. Detta’s aptitude for shooting makes her a natural gunslinger, a worthy entrant into Roland’s trio. Roland’s ability to see the aptitude in Detta again reflects his astute grasp of people as well as his mentor-like role in Eddie’s and Detta’s lives.

“You just go on! Sho! Suck on ye each one’s candles! Do it while you got a chance, cause Detta Walker goan get outen dis chair and cut dem skinny ole white candles off.”

This problematic passage illustrates the text’s confused portrayal of a Black character as well as its hidden ableism. Detta Walker talks in an impossible dialect, a fact that Eddie notes. However, the very inclusion of such a dialect amounts to a stereotype. The casual suggestion that a woman with a disability will get out of her “chair” is likewise problematic.

“The gunslinger wanted to comfort him, could not commit such a sacrilege (he remembered Jake too well), and walked off into the dark.”

Eddie feels he has lost Odetta to Detta and collapses in grief. Roland wants to comfort him but withdraws, wary of forming emotional attachments. Roland’s response to Eddie echoes his summation of his own character as a tiger next to a deer. He’s constantly torn between his romantic, empathetic side and his single-minded quest.

“Death was not for him; death was become him.”

The moment of slipping into Jack Mort’s mind leads Roland to a critical understanding about his own role in the ka-tet. He’s the third who completes Eddie and Susannah, the Death card. Roland is destined not to die but to dispense death, whether willingly or otherwise. The enigmatic phrasing of this line leaves much to interpretation, enhancing Roland’s mystique.

“There was something so predatory and barbaric about this image—the rope caught in the grin—that he was frozen, staring at her with a horror that only made her grin widen.”

The image of Detta gripping the rope that chokes Eddie with her teeth is meant to symbolize her violence and amorality but ends up being a caricature. Regardless of its symbolic meaning in the text, the depiction of a Black woman with a disability as predatory rings too close to risible stereotypes.

“Jack was, in his own way, much like an amateur lepidopterist.

By profession, he was a successful C.P.A.

Pushing was his only hobby.”

These chilling lines show how evil can coexist with a regular-seeming facade. An accountant with a successful professional life, Mort kills people for a hobby, much like a lepidopterist collects butterflies for fun. This shows that evil doesn’t just operate as mythical monsters but also as people harming other people. The reference to Mort being a CPA (Certified Public Accountant) is bleakly funny.

“Control the things you can control, maggot. Let everything else take a flying fuck at you and if you must go down, go down with your guns blazing.”

Cort’s voice in Roland’s head is always a source of humor and tough advice. As Roland heads to the drug store, he’s keenly aware that time is running out for Eddie in the other world. However, Roland can’t let this awareness distract him from his mission.

“‘You’re a dangerous fool who should be sent west,’ he told the unconscious man. ‘You have forgotten the face of your father.’”

Roland’s contempt for the police officer who starts shooting in a location that may contain civilians is a comment on real-world concerns about irresponsible policing. In the worldview of the gunslingers, a true protector never endangers the innocent. Thus, Roland incapacitates the officer and bids him to be sent west, which is what happens to those who fail gunslinger training in his world.

“For the first time since a man named Jack Mort had dropped a brick on the head of a child who was only there to be hit because a white taxi driver had taken one look and driven away…she was whole.”

Odetta’s recollection of the event that deeply traumatized her shows how systemic racism makes certain people vulnerable from the start. While Mort didn’t drop a brick on Odetta because she was Black, she was in his line of attack because no cab was willing to stop for her family. Thus, racist biases played an indirect role in causing her trauma. In the context of the theme of The Relationship Between Destiny and Free Will, this quote calls into question whether every person enjoys the same degree of choice and freedom of action. Some may have the luxury of exercising free will, while socioeconomic forces may limit others from having the same degree of freedom to exercise their free will. Similarly, what’s considered destiny may be a combination of social biases and oppression.