（外文电子版资料）SK.TheDrawingofTheThree.doc

PAGE PAGE 132 To Don Grant, whos taken a chance on these novels, one by one. ARGUMENT The Drawing of the Three is the second volume of a long tale called The Dark Tower, a tale inspired by and to some degree dependent upon Robert Brownings narrative poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came (which in its turn owes a debt to King Lear). The first volume, The Gunslinger, tells how Roland, the last gunslinger of a world which has moved on, finally catches up with the man in black ... a sorcerer he has chased for a very long time—just how long we do not yet know. The man in black turns out to be a fellow named Walter, who falsely claimed the friendship of Rolands father in those days before the world moved on. Rolands goal is not this half-human creature but the Dark Tower; the man in black—and, more specifically, what the man in black knows—is his first step on his road to that mysterious place. Who, exactly, is Roland? What was his world like before it moved on? What is the Tower, and why does he pursue it? We have only fragmentary answers. Roland is a gunslinger, a kind of knight, one of those charged with holding a world Roland remembers as being filled with love and light as it is; to keep it from moving on. We know that Roland was forced to an early trial of manhood after discovering that his mother had become the mistress of Marten, a much greater sorcerer than Walter (who, unknown to Rolands father, is Martens ally); we know Marten has planned Rolands discovery, expecting Roland to fail and to be sent West; we know that Roland triumphs in his test. What else do we know? That the gunslingers world is not completely unlike our own. Artifacts such as gasoline pumps and certain songs (Hey Jude, for instance, or the bit of doggerel that begins Beans, beans, the musical fruit . . .) have survived; so have customs and rituals oddly like those from our own romanticized view of the American west. And there is an umbilicus which somehow connects our world to the world