“You’ll set fire to yourself, she says.”
Why are there no quotation marks around the words a person speaks out loud? This is kind of confusing. (Page 10)
Essay Question
1970. Choose a character from a novel or play of recognized literary merit and write an essay in which you (a) briefly describe the standards of the fictional society in which the character exists and (b) show how the character is affected by and responds to those standards. In your essay do not merely summarize the plot.
Essay
In the novel “The Gunslinger”, written by Stephen King, there is one character that excels all the others. His name is Roland Deschain, the gunslinger. Roland is a major character in this book, who without, there would be no story. His quest in this novel is to find “the man in black.” The setting starts off in a desert with very little around. As the gunslinger roams the area, he comes across a small hut in the middle of no where. There is one dweller that lives there, known as Brown. Brown does not live within limits and can do what he wants, which is to survive. Because of this, there are no standards in this area, except the standards needed to survive. The gunslinger follows those standards to survive by accepting food and shelter from Brown.
As the story progresses, the gunslinger soon finds himself in a small town. In the town, the standards are very low. The town is filled with rape, drunks, drugs, fright, and unnatural beings. A lot of the people are not nice, and do not approve of the gunslinger. Many fear him and try to avoid him. This causes him to do some strange things. The town is unwilling to cooperate with him and give him what he wants, such as the information he needs. This causes the gunslinger to do things that are not right, such as sleep with Allie who gives him information that he needs. The information he gains takes him to a woman named Sylvia Pittston, who is carrying “the man in black’s” baby. The gunslinger is desperate to find “the man in black”. Sylvia refuses at first to tell him where he can find “the man in black”, but is forced to tell him when he kills the baby inside of her.
The gunslinger lives in a society with very low standards. No rules are really followed; things get pretty chaotic. The gunslinger knows this, which makes him do unimaginable things. He uses Allie to get information he needs, then he turns around and aborts a baby from Sylvia because she first refused him the information he wanted.
Study Guides
The Dark Tower : The Gunslinger – by Stephen King : Audiobook
This is the full Stephen King’s “The Gunslinger” book in audio form. It is great to listen to and helps with the imagery.
The Gunslinger Trailer
This video is a YouTube post by a Stephen King fan made through a video game.
7th Post “‘You learn,’ Cort said, ‘but your tongue has a bad habit of lolling from your stupid mouth when your instructor’s back is turned.'”
I see this every day when I go to school. There is always a student or teacher who is talking bad about another. They never confront the person they are talking about, only talk about them behind their back. I find this very cowardly. If you have an insult for somebody, you should be brave enough to tell them and not talk about it behind their back.
6th Post “For a moment the gunslinger felt mixed feelings of nostalgia and fear, stiched in with an eerie feeling of déjà vu– he thought: I dreamed this. When?”
I didn’t know what the word nostalgia meant, and was interested when I discovered it meant a pleasure and sadness that is caused by remembering something from the past and wishing that you could experience it again. I can relate to what the gunslinger has just said, because sometimes I have that déjà vu feeling too. When a certain event happens, I know I have seen and felt it before. It is a sensational and confusing feeling. I have always wondered what causes that feeling, and came to the conclusion that I must have dreamt it at one point in time, but I can never pin point it.
5th Post “He caught sight of Soobie leaning out a window and whirled on her. ‘I’ll whale you now, you little slutface! ‘Fore God! I’ll—‘”
For a father to say that to his daughter, is just disgusting. That man has no dignity for himself or for her. A father should never talk to his daughter that way. This just makes me so angry, that a father would call his own daughter a “slutface” and threaten to hit her. It makes it worse that he does this in front of company. This behavior is what makes a child act out, not demons. The only demon that seems to be harassing this girl, is her own father.
4th Post “‘He had a honeywagon for a while. Started to drink. Started to smell the grass. Then to smoke it.'”
Nort seemed to have had a decent life before getting into devil grass, which is a highly addictive drug. That grass ended up taking over his life, just as often as it does to everybody else. Drugs ruin lives, and this is just another example of how. It never starts as an addictive, but it always ends that way. The devil grass has destroyed Nort, leaving him just as an empty shell. It’s sad, because many people suffer from this fate every day.
The Gunslinger 