Few people today do not recognize the name of author Stephen King, the current champion of the horror genre. He has written over thirty one novels and easily twice that number of short stories, not to mention the titles written under his pen name Richard Bachman. Throughout his career no tale has taken him as long to spin as that of Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger, and his epic quest for the Dark Tower. The Dark Tower series, which is seven books altogether, is King’s equivalent of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Roland’s quest doesn’t take place in a magical world of elves and hobbits though, his journey begins in a world much like an old western style of our own that has “moved on”, a statement that recurs often through the series. By “moved on” King means things in Roland’s world are beginning to fall apart, the machinery of an ancient race is no longer understood by others while time and space are no longer traveling at the same rate. Roland’s world, called All World, is the nexus of Stephen King’s multiverse and is the only universe to contain the version of the Dark Tower that Roland must reach to stop the decay of time and essentially save the universe from collapsing. The Dark Tower itself is described as the edifice which holds together all of time, located in the center of the six beams that hold the world together. In other parallel universes the Tower is represented by a “singing” rose in a vacant lot which seems to hold the universe at its center (I know, just stay with me). Roland must travel through some of these separate “wheres and whens” to find the companions fate has chosen for him, preserve the rose in the those alternate realities, and complete tasks that will lead him to his final destination after decades of searching.

There are numerous ways to travel through time and realities in this series. One of these possibilities is through magical intervention that is never fully explained to the reader. The first instance of time (or plane) travel we see is the mysterious appearance of a boy named Jake in the middle of a desert. Through hypnosis Roland learns he was from a place which the audience recognizes as a version of modern day New York. He was pushed in front of a car and killed, somehow transporting him to Roland’s world (we are led to assume through the magic of Roland’s nemesis, the man in black). The next example takes place at the end of the first novel where Roland finally catches up to Walter, the man in black, whom he has been chasing for twenty odd years. They “palaver”, or hold council for a period of time after which Roland sleeps. When he awakes the sorcerer is nothing but a skeleton and Roland has aged ten years. There are still a number of other traveling methods I will not elaborate on including telekinesis and “thinnies” (thin areas in the fabric of time); what we are really here to explore is King’s use of dimension doors. After the end of the first novel, Roland is left wandering a desolate beach only to happen upon the first of these, a peculiar free standing door.

There are two types of doorways in the Dark Tower series, those that function through magical means and those that have been mechanically created by the Old Ones, an ancient and extinct race. The first door the Gunslinger sees is the former, standing alone on an empty beach. These doors are of an uncertain origin to us. While they are certainly magical in nature it is unknown if the cause of their creation was a magical tension between the hero and sorcerer or the forces of fate. The first door is described as such, “It stood six and a half feet high and appeared to be made of solid ironwood, although the nearest ironwood tree must grow seven hundred miles or more from here” and “it simply stood there on the gray strand twenty feet above the high tide”, it had hinges, but they were attached to nothing (The Drawing of the Three 33-34). Upon closer examination of the door, Roland finds that at certain angles, it seems to simply disappear, but when he returns to the spot where he saw the front of the door it’s still there. The first three magic doors all have this same quality and lead to different minds of people living at different times in New York City roughly between the seventies and eighties. The third door is where the concept of fate in reference to the creation of the doors is most palpable, for as Eddie and Susannah (the inhabitants of the first two doors) try to open the third door, the knob will not turn for them, only Roland can open it and step through the doorway (The Drawing of the Three 293).

There are two other major doorways that appear through magical means later in the series as well. The first of these two is seen in The Waste lands, the third book of the Dark Tower saga. It is vaguely explained that there are places of power within the various versions of the world where it is possible to travel by magic means, through already existing portals or the creation of one. In the middle of a circle of stones which symbolize the power of the place, the three companions work together to distract the demon in residence (for these areas of power are occupied by menacing ghostlike creatures who guard the portals) and create a door of their own (The Waste Lands277). The creation of the door occurs when Eddie draws it out in the dirt with a stick. As the drawing is finished the outline becomes solid and wooden, turning into a doorway to New York in the late seventies or early eighties, the other side of which opens on a house that is also a manifestation of a guardian. The next door of questionable origin appears mysteriously in a cave in the town of Calla Bryn Sturgis toward the end of Roland’s journey in the book Wolves of the Calla. This door gives us even less of an explanation than the former ones as this one has appeared randomly where there was once nothing and requires the presence of a magic orb, much like a crystal ball, to open. Also, whereas the other doors opened to specific places and times, this door can be manipulated to bring the travelers to many different “wheres and whens”.

The second way the doors are represented is through a melding of magic and science. The first mechanical door is not seen, but mentioned when the group hears the grinding of machinery below the surface of a forest where they encounter a guardian of the beams that hold the world in place. Roland labels the unseen noise as a mechanical sort of portal akin to the doorways on the beach, but separate in that it was a man-made creation (The Waste Lands 109). They choose not to explore this portal, so the audience is left unsure of what the door looks like, although later mechanical doors are described as emitting the same sounds of the noisy failing of inner machinery. The first overt example we are given of a mechanical dimension door is in Song of Susannah, the sixth book of the series. Mia, a spirit inhabitant of All World who has possessed one of Roland’s companions, Susannah, explains the doors without including too much detail as the knowledge of the Old Ones is now lost:

Magic doors…go both ways. The doors North Central Positronics made to replace them when the Prim receded and the magic faded . . . they go only one way. Maybe they didn’t have time to make teleportation a two lane highway before the world moved on. (Song of Susannah 248)

Towards the end of the quest we begin to see more and more of these mechanical doors in parts of the world that are still functioning on a very erratic basis. Jake, the last companion to join Roland’s group also encounters a number of these doorways in a series of corridors beneath a club in New York called The Dixie Pig. The series of doors appear to have been created for the purpose of entertainment or vacation, as the labels on some of them are dates of important events occurring in American history such as the assassinations of presidents Lincoln and Kennedy. The doors associated with magical manifestation were all made of ironwood, but the doors that are mechanical are made of a material called ghostwood or metal and are reasonably rooted in walls instead of standing free in the air (The Dark Tower 110).

In addition to the doors used as portals to other versions and times, there is another door that is mentioned which leads to nowhere. It’s a place called todash, a name given to the oblivion that is the space between worlds. This idea follows with the idea that the world is expanding, leaving blank spaces. Mia also explains this place to Susannah saying,

There are endless worlds, your dinh is correct about that, but even when those worlds are close together—like some of the multiple New Yorks—there are endless spaces between. Think ya of the spaces between the inner and outer walls of a house. Places where it’s always dark . . . That door beneath the castle—one of their mistakes, I have no doubt—goes nowhere at all. Into the darkness between worlds. (Song of Susannah 248)

This statement that there are “pockets” between parallels in time further supports the multiple worlds theory due to the fact that it is based on the expansion of the universe because of tiny quantum fluctuations. The todash darkness is the torn space in the middle.

In conclusion, while Stephen King may incorporate a myriad of time and dimension travel possibilities into The Dark Tower series he uses the doorways as the main means of expressing the jump. His ideas of time travel in that aspect are relatively vague, but by giving the phenomenon a more magical aspect instead of basing the doors more on science, his characters have the ability to move more freely from time to time and place to place. The uses of the magical as well as mechanical doorways have a deus ex machina quality to them because of their vagueness. For example, many of the doorways in the books appear out of the need to escape. Not that they magically appear out of thin air (although it is occasionally the case), but that they are conveniently nearby when our heroes need to escape eminent doom in some form or other. Still, by using the doors and other methods of time travel to link a giant multiverse together, King has created a multiverse of his own works as well. Throughout the Dark Tower are references to other books King has written, other worlds that have slipped through the thin parts of time to Roland’s as well as characters and themes from other literary works. You can find pieces of The Stand, Insomnia, Hearts in Atlantis, It, and numerous novels written by others like The Wizard of Oz and Shardik interwoven with the quest of Roland. King has even found a way to write himself into his own book, a use of time travel in literature that is rarely seen.