Did you agree with King later revising the first novel to have Roland kill Allie as an expression of mercy, or do you prefer him slaying his lover out of pure ingrained reflex?
--- It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing .
Ditto. I get that Roland killing someone he cared for while they're clearly visible and out in the open is dramatic/sad, but it doesn't line up with the man's experience handling his iconic revolvers up to that point.
--- It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing .
Ditto. I get that Roland killing someone he cared for while they're clearly visible and out in the open is dramatic/sad, but it doesn't line up with the man's experience handling his iconic revolvers up to that point.
A lot of it has to do with the changes in the series as a whole and how the portrayal of Roland.
In the original telling of The Gunslinger, he is a lot less "stoic wise man/ mentor" that he becomes later on. He is a lot more like the hawk, a creature that kills out of instinct, which is kind of keeping with the themes of the book (isolated from the rest of the books) as a whole - anything that dies in the original gunslinger, dies because of Roland (The weed eater is the one exception). Sending David off to die, letting Jake die to feed his addiction, heck, the book even implies that the act of catching up to Walter is what makes him die (again, this is before the other books bring him back). And he can't help it. To change that one death to an instinctual kill to a mercy kill kind of runs contrary to that cruel irony
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Reflex. I never quite liked the over-emphasis on "nineteen" in the last three books as well as the revised Gunslinger, and while it was a creepy addition, I think that early Roland works best when he has no room for mercy. Mercy is what he learns through the course of his journey with the ka-tet.