On Stephen King, the Dark Tower, Lisey’s Story, and memory. Open spoilers

Cafe Society
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I’m listening to the audiobook of Lisey’s Story, having first read the book about 15 years ago. I was a newlywed at the time, and naturally I focused on the parts of the book involving the relationship between Lisey and Scott, especially the parts when they were newlyweds. On this second read through, I’m noticing something different. A major part of the story involves Lisey having a “purple curtain” behind which she hides painful memories, and which she strongly resists looking behind until circumstances force her to.

How does this relate to the Dark Tower? The penultimate part of the Dark Tower has all the main characters other than Roland seemingly getting a happy ending. As King puts it “they didn’t live happily ever after, because no one ever does, but they did live and they were happy.”* Part of this being happy, however, includes all the characters forgetting about all the adventures they shared with Roland and with each other.

This is where memory comes in. I believe that memories are what makes us who we are. Being made to forget something, or even voluntarily choosing to block out certain memories, does not seem to me like a path towards being happy. Yet for King, that seems to be what he’s genuinely stating in these two books.

Am I the weird one, with my belief that our memories are what make us who we are, and destroying them or blocking them off is in some sense a violation of our person, or do (presumably, based on how he writes) King’s beliefs on memory seem more like what most people actually feel?

Please move to a different forum if appropriate.

*. This is one of my favorite lines in all of literature. Ironically what he describes isn’t at all what I would consider living and being happy.

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The flip side (or one of the sides onto which it can be flipped, at any rate) is the notion that things that happened to you that you don’t recall can be affecting you — that not remembering is not at all the same as being as if it hadn’t happened in the first place.

There is a medication often given to patients receiving surgical operations, called Versed. Several medical professionals have proudly told me that it doesn’t stop pain, it makes it so that you won’t remember the pain later, and isn’t that just wonderful! Uh uh, none for me.

I’ve always had the attitude that replaying traumatic events in my life is how I’ve best been able to defang them from continuing to harm me. That when you remember such things, you come to terms with them and can then move on.

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I don’t think that’s quite right. Consider Eddie!Prime (the one who would remember the ka tet and his adventures in Mid World) and Eddie 2.0 (the one who is living happily). These are simply different people, because as you say, memories are what make us who we are.

But say Eddie!Prime ever came across a shimmer where he could look back upon his younger pre-Roland self, and you asked him what he hoped younger Eddie’s life would be like? Do you think it would involve the pain of Mid World? Or do you think it would be for an idyllic life without those memories?

I honestly don’t know. I think King likes to force us to feel the bittersweet loss of Eddie losing those accomplishments, as well as of Roland losing his ka tet (again). We the readers know what Eddie did. Roland knows what Eddie did. But the world has moved on, and so we have to live with the fact that Eddie doesn’t know - and in fact, is a different Eddie altogether because of it.

It’s a cop out, certainly. King hates settling on an ending, and makes us accept lesser versions of several of them at the same time.

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I think it depends greatly on the person, the author, and the character. Absolutely zero shade thrown at @FlikTheBlue, as I too share that what I am is largely what my memories inform. It’s why various forms of dementia are a horror to me personally. But even I have minor memories that pop up from time to time, including a early puppy-love episode that I sometimes wish I could lock away because it still makes me wince over 40 years later. Would I actually do it? Ask me again tomorrow, but I can see the appeal even given my feelings about me-as-memory.

But in the specifics of the Dark Tower, we have two different issues IMHO.

One - certain things about how the world works really can’t be safely known to all. For the sake of preserving the beams, the flowers, and the tower, it’s arguably best for all those memories to fade and be lost. Plus, there’s the argument to be made that they aren’t exactly lost (which I think @Munch is hinting at with King having multiple answers, along with the the partial endings of his many other works), they’re just relegated to half-remembered dreams on the cusp of consciousness. Enough so that your feelings are preserved, but not the concrete memory of what and why.

The last thing is, the main characters in the Dark Tower all suffer from some serious trauma, and for them to have a “true” ending with happiness, I’d argue that much of their memories would have to go. The quest, like any other Arthurian quest, gives them much of their meaning and makes the sacrifices bearable. But given the degree of loss and death they all suffer (I mean, technically only Susannah and Roland “Live”) I think that a forgetting is a merciful option.

A final point, from the quest standpoint, Susannah chooses to leave before the final end of the story. It is for a moment of hope, as well as a recognition that Roland’s quest is, as always “Death, but not for you”. Still, in many heroic tales to leave before the end is a failure. I don’t judge Susannah for it at all, per my comments on the trauma she’s been through, not the least of losing her love and new family, but it’s a common theme in such stories.

So, Susannah’s forgetting is a choice she makes of her own free will, and of course, Roland’s forgetting is part of a long (but not perpetual) repentance. I respect Susannah’s right to choose, even if I’m not sure I’d do the same.

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I agree with you, but I’ve seen a lot of people argue on both sides of the issue.

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This bring to mind J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. As the years roll on by, Peter doesn’t retain memories of his past. By the end of the novel, Peter doesn’t really remember Tinkerbell or Captain Hook, and is a little scared of Wendy when he meets her when she’s an adult with children of her own. Peter doesn’t grow up because he can’t learn from his own experiences.

I don’t think you’re weird. Captain Kirk pretty much said the same in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, referring to pain as one of “the other things we carry that makes us who we are.” In truth, I always interpreted the end of the Dark Tower as Susannah being given the reward of a happy life but Eddie and Jake are both dead. In the world Susannah goes to, I think Jake is Eddie’s little brother. I don’t even think Susannah went back to the same world she came from.

King is a pretty prolific writer, so I’d be hard pressed to come to any conclusion about his personal beliefs based on two stories. It’s certainly food for thought though.

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Another aspect of the Dark Tower books is the fact there are many versions of each character. Roland goes through Jakes as often as I go through cheap pens.

I do apologize I can’t add anything regarding Lisey’s Story - I haven’t read that one.

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I don’t know what Stephen King believes, but I agree with this, and I think that this is a central principle of effective talk therapy, especially if facilitated by a skilled therapist. (I have no opinion about King, having read very little of his work.)

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I agree that giving Susannah a happy ending was what King was going for. I just think he fell short of the mark. IMHO what he described as a happy ending wasn’t actually happy. Admittedly he had written himself into a corner due to the whole “life, but not for you” thing, and that was probably his best way out.