Ending of The Dark Tower Fully Explained | The Dark 'Dark Tower' Theory

First off, I'd like to rebuke your claim of being the foremost expert on the Dark Tower as that title belongs to me - I wrote my graduation thesis on the books. Now that we have that cleared up, here's some thoughts I have after watching your video. I absolutely agree with 99% of it, but I don't believe that this is Hell in an afterlife sense. I do believe that it is a kind of torturous hell designed to punish Roland but I also believe that is the real world(s) where he is alive. As I write this I ponder whether or not the Tower itself put Roland's obsession of the Tower in his head as a kind of a crucible, where a man who exemplifies the Hell their world is is put into a situation where he could change himself and through that the world around him. As for the Horn, I do believe that it has some sort of significance. My previous line of thought was that it would enable him to use it as the key to the Tower, leaving it at the door and carrying the revolver inside or vice versa. After watching this however, I do believe its significance is still as a possible key to the Tower, but not in the sense that Roland himself could use it. Maybe after proving himself during the journey we see in comparison to the sins he commited in loops before that we haven't seen, the Tower/Gan deemed Roland ready for a greater challenge, that being the Horn. An alternate key to the Tower removes the importance of Roland's decision to continue the quest after the Breakers reveal the Beams will heal since he doesn't control the only means for the Crimson King's victory. That could be further incentive for him to abandon the Tower because after Algul Siento falls the Red have more reason to believe they could still win. With the added pressure and conflict Roland may be pushed into a more responsible role

The entire series you have the number 19 all over the place, but at the end he is on highway 18. its the count down.

Oy’s death hit me the hardest.

Horn of Eld - he doesn't take it because he is concerned with himself, getting himself to the Tower mainly. Second to last loop theory - His Ka-Tet taught him to think of others and be able to focus on more than that damned tower. So if you follow the second last theory - we are told a story of a man who lets go of his obsession for humanity and all the highs and lows of it. Hence why he is worthy of the line of Eld (The horn). The Quest isn't just the Dark Tower, it's also Roland learning to love (sounds dumb when I write it) and serve for people. I wonder if anyone actually stopped reading when King told us to. I feel like we failed and that may have been the point - we couldn't let Jake, Suse, Ed and Oy be happy - we had to know about this damned Tower. We could have let that be the ending and just wonder if Roland made it. We, as the reader, are Roland in this way - focused on the end and not the journey. Eddie being shot with the pistol that killed a rapist bothered me so much. Oy is a mad lad and a good boy. Jake also gave Roland permission "Go then, there are other worlds than these" which made it easy for Roland to forsake Jake. Susannah the lady formally known as O/Detta always knew the score. It has been my pet theory that The Dark Tower is an epic tale about epic tales. Hence the late stage Meta Author stuff and the connections across his books - This is a love letter to stories told as a story

The moments in these books when people refer to Roland as "Older than God" turn out to be really quite specific once you finish the series.

Plot hole sir. When Roland is reinserted into line one of book one he still has 2 missing fingers from the libstrocities and he now has the Horn of Eld.

I don’t think Roland starting the loop with the horn of Eld means nothing. If all the other quotes going up the tower have a deep meaning to how he should break the cycle, I don’t think King would throw in the horn just for pointless flavour text. I think maybe like every time he does the loop he maybe does it a little bit better and gets closer to breaking it. Like maybe in a previous loop he killed jake a second time or something. I don’t think we’re seeing the second to last loop but him slowly getting closer to the end even if it takes many more loops. That being said this is a great video and very well done! Hope you do some more!

The problem with this theory is that Roland is smart enough to realise that if the tower falls everything ends, it should be his prime objective no matter what. Him choosing the tower before saving anyone else is common sense, if he doesnt make it to the tower because he stopped to save someone else, it will have been for nothing when the tower falls.

Not sure if you'll read this, but I read every comment and no one else made this point. Super, well thought out video btw, but I think it's significantly more simple than you or anyone else is making it. King is Gan. All writers are the Gods in their books. And they interfere always, as they write everyone's fate. Gan did save the universe by writing that Roland saved the universe. BUT unlike other stories, King allowed for the main character in the book to know what happens for every character in every book ever written, no matter the ending. They are all doomed to start the journey again. and again, and again, as long as the story is re-read. The only way the Dark Tower is doomed and the cycle ends is if the reader stops reading. Roland is not evil for wanting to get to the tower, the reader is evil for not stopping. Every page turned the cog of Ka's wheel cranks forward and Roland can't get off. So NO, the loop cannot end, it is not a spiral, it is not Groundhog's Day and Roland needs to learn to love - and I have proof: Read all the books again. You think it will be different this time? Here's the trick though, until you start rereading the end stands and yes, Roland has the horn. You see? The readers are the evil ones forcing Roland to relive this journey. Forcing him to the Tower, time and again, for eternity. How many times has Roland gone on this journey? How many books were sold, how many times were they read and reread. So yes, Roland is in hell, but at least for one small second he knows it, whereas heroes in all other stories are reliving hells and dramas, love and loss, but without ever knowing they too are in an endless loop. The "loop" is the most meta of metas, it represents us, the readers, turning back to that first page, time and again.

So you’re just wrong. You’re going to pretend like Roland WASNT REALLY given the horn this time in the cycle, at the end, and just throw that out… Except. IT HAPPENED! He HAS the horn, and it IS the glimmer of hope that maybe this time it will be different. On NO OTHER cycles did he have the horn. It changes EVERYTHING. And your theory just goes “NOPE, pretend he never got the horn at the end”. Sorry to burst ur bubble. He DID get the horn! I like to think the next cycle (which im DESPERATE for king to write), will be the final cycle for him, and he triumphs at the end along with ALL the characters alive! Afterall, King himself writes in the book “Truly, i meant for all the characters to make it to the tower”. Leading me to believe this next time, they will!

letting a couple people die to save ALL UNIVERSES is not an excuse. It's prioritization.

I think Roland's multiverse is King's multiverse. It's like Bastion's Fantasia in The Neverending Story. It's the world of King's imagination, the skeleton that holds it all together, the meta story that links all of King's stories. Roland is an avatar of King himself, his heroic and imagined self in the hero's journey as a writer inventing the universe of ideas that spans all his books. Wasn't there a character in the Langoliers who often has a recurring fantasy of himself as a gunslinger in the Wild West? Roland is a personal symbol for King. Roland's flaws are an imagined version of King's own flaws as a person, flaws he explored in The Shining with the Jack Torrance character. King explained that Jack Torrance was a version of himself, but all the characters in King's many stories are him. They can't be anyone else because King can't actually be anyone but himself when writing them, flaws and all. The Tower is dying because King himself is dying, as is everybody else one second at a time. The story does, in fact, end. The end will come when King stops writing. Some people might not like this theory because it means everything in the The Dark Tower books is imaginary, but of course everything in every story King ever wrote is imaginary. In referencing himself and placing himself in the The Dark Tower multiverse, The Dark Tower is linked the real world in a way none of his other books are. Roland in a sense becomes more true or real than any other character King created. It's in The Dark Tower that the line between reality and fiction begins to blur in a way that it doesn't in any other book King wrote. To consider the way in which Roland (or the Tower) "exists" is to consider the nature of autobiography that is inevitably coded in fiction, or the way ideas generally can be said to "exist." King himself alluded to this in one forward or another somewhere by pointing out that in art, the truth is found in the lie, and the lie is found in the truth. Roland actually exists in reality outside of this or any other book. His name is Stephen King. He's a literal, real guy. King is Roland and vice versa. As for the Tower, I think it's a personal psychological symbol for King. It's the object of desire, an archetype, like the muse which inspires us to create or the addiction that inspires us to destroy ourselves. Roland's compulsion to chase the Tower is like the compulsion that led King to drink but also to prioritize his art over his family. King admits that he is a junkie by inclination or nature, a junkie for alcohol, but also for the Faustian creative endeavor which might cost him everything. Remember how the Overlook tried to seduce Jack with the scrapbook which he might use for his book? One compulsion is easily substituted for the other: Alcoholism can easily be swapped for workaholism and both are a way of building a wall around yourself and everybody or everything else in your life. Roland in the story is like King in real life: They are Faust, basically. Look at King's whole body of work. His fears about his personal failings and his alcoholism haunt those works or loom over them in the same way the Dark Tower looms over Roland's quest. It's Eddie Dean trying to shed his former life as a junkie and become a hero, or it's Jack Torrance trying to write and be a worthy father and husband, but it's also Larry Underwood being haunted by the idea that "he ain't no nice guy!" and so on. It's everywhere throughout King's books. It's unclear if finding the Tower will damn Roland or be his salvation. It's unclear if the tower is a symbol of those weaknesses or if it is the final destination where he does battle with them and conquers them once and for all. Does the archetypal object of desire lead us to greatness or to destruction? From everything King has said about writing and creativity, it's likely that he thinks the same way about his work. Roland chases the Tower in King's books, King himself chases the Tower when he writes. King himself has said that he rarely knows how a story will end when he starts it; if the Tower is a symbol for conclusions generally -- y'know, The Conclusion -- if it is the place where everything gets added up and we decide what the meaning of it all was, then there's no way King could know for sure what it is because he hasn't reached it yet. As he's joke repeatedly, people always hate his endings. In real life, of course, King didn't put writing or alcohol before his family. He got clean and situated his writing within his overall life rather than sacrificing his life for it by replacing alcoholism with workaholism. He describes this in On Writing when he talks about his writing desk, which became a symbol somehow of his unhealthy relationship with creativity in his youth, and how he got rid of it so his family could use that room while he just took a little place in the corner to do his writing. This part of On Writing probably tells us more about the Dark Tower than anything else King has said or wrote. I think the Dark Tower is a personal allegory for King's relationship with his vices and his struggle with personal weakness in the face of them. Roland can't see that the people around him are what matter, not the Tower, just like King couldn't see it in his years as an alcoholic. From everything King has written, we can guess that this has been the real narrative of King's life, the real struggle, his real life quest. If he was a character in a book, this would be the conflict which had to be resolved, the Tower which had to be reached to conclude the story, regardless if it ended happily or unhappily. As for the ending, I think it's perfect. "Ka is a wheel." In some sense, the story never ends. Even when King is gone and there are no new stories, they will live on anyway in people's imagination, and the archetypes they employ will be taken up by others just as they were before King. It's a really elegant way to end the story because, if nothing else, it's a way of describing stories themselves and our relationship to them. They never really end. Even after the final chapter, the hero will appear in some new iteration and will journey to some new conclusion through some new conflict and face down some new villain. Narrative itself could be understood as having universal features and reduced to a theoretical model in Euripides, for instance, because it really is like like wheel. The end of one story is always the beginning of another.

Great video! Thanks for all the info.

Stephen King wrote that he had been contacted by a woman who was terminally ill, begging him to give her the ending. He wrote that he couldn’t, as he didn’t know what it was at that point. Therefore, I don’t believe any “hints” were intentional. But I understand that they could be interpreted as such. I’ve read the series twice and may well return again to this wonderful saga.

My generous thought is that Roland will get out of the loop when he consistently and actively puts the people in his life first. It's not enough just to think he'll do it or do it once. And I think the Horn is a hint to him of that.

Great explanations and I definitely agree it makes a lot of sense. I didn't really over think it after reading, I just enjoyed the end of an amazing journey. Thanks for the video.

I love this interpretation. I always saw the loop as a punishment, but it being hell with no actual redemption possible works so well

Good video, I like the theory but respectfully disagree about Roland being stuck in a version of hell. My interpretation was having the Horn of Eld was meant to signal that Roland would finally be able to end the loop, and the reason he got it this time specifically was because he had learned what it meant to love and care for others. Yes, he was still selfish in his pursuit of the Tower, and yes he ultimately sacrificed his Ka-Tet in that pursuit, but he had also learned enough (about the Tower and himself) to break the cycle the next time through, and his "reward" was the thing he needed to do just that.

Dude What a wnderful and complete analisis from this epic saga, please continue making these kind of videos¡¡

Thank you for really interesting essay!