The Dark Tower

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, child death, substance use, and addiction.

“Callahan strode briskly toward the others. His fear was gone. The shadow of shame that had hung over him ever since Barlow had taken his cross and broken it was also gone.”

Father Callahan lost his defining battle to vampires in ‘Salem’s Lot because of his crisis of faith. His experiences in Mid-World and his time with the gunslingers have restored his faith, meaning that the power of the cross over the vampires has returned. This allows Callahan to die at peace in a moment that foreshadows several other redemptive sacrifices, including Jake’s and Oy’s.

“Foolhardy or not, Roland was fiercely proud of Jake. He saw the boy had established canda between himself and Callahan: that distance […] which assures that a pair of outnumbered gunslingers cannot be killed by a single shot.”

In the first book of the Dark Tower series, Roland sacrificed Jake in the name of his quest. Now, they have developed the bond of a father and son, and Roland takes pride in how Jake acquits himself while in danger. Jake has become a gunslinger; to Roland, this is the greatest gift that he can bestow on his adopted son.

“Mordred too was a twin, a Jekyll-and-Hyde creature with two selves, and he—or it—had the faces of two fathers to remember.”

As the son of two fathers—one good and one evil—Mordred embodies duality, including The Duality of the Cosmos. The language of this passage, including the allusion to Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the contrasting pronouns “he” and “it,” suggests this duality; Mordred exists at the intersection of good and evil, human and animal.