OK, I need help sorting out who exactly Flagg is in the Dark Tower books. Below is what I’ve been able to figure out from reading the first four books and checking online:
–He’s Marten Broadcloak, Steven Deschain’s wizard who seduced Gabrielle Deschain. Correct? But then, why didn’t Gabrielle’s hair go all white as Nadine’s did in The Stand?
–According to this site http://www.thedarktower.net/character.php?id=43
Walter, the man in black, was also Marten. But then, how is it that Roland wakes up next to Walter’s skeleton and takes the jawbone with him?
–Flagg is also The Ageless Stranger, as “Richard Fannin” says in The Wastelands. That means he is also Maerlyn, who made Maerlyn’s Rainbow, correct? This seems to be so, considering the nature of the gate to the glass palace at the end of Wizard and Glass.
–Flagg is also Legion, the Ageless Stranger’s real name, according to Walter. That makes him the Devil too, I guess, huh?
Please let me know if somewhere along the line I’ve gotten confused about the nature of Mr. Flagg.
What exactly is Flagg’s mission? He’s a minion of The Crimson King, who is imprisoned in the Dark Tower and can’t get out until the Tower is destroyed, right? This destruction he seeks to hasten by employing Breakers to break down the Beams that hold the Tower up (which we see in “Everything’s Eventual” and Hearts in Atlantis). Flagg, as an agent of The Random (isn’t that was the Agents say The Crimson King is king of, in Insomnia?) seeks to sow disorder and entropy by overturning social order and turning people against each other, all the better to break the Beams. Is this accurate?
Any ideas about what will happen if The Crimson King gets loose?
Walter is not Marten. This is going around because of an error in an afterword in one edition of the Wastelands due to a comma being inserted in a sentence. You can see it here, scroll down to the bottom of the page: http://www.geocities.com/darktowercompendium/nitpicker-dt3.html
Thats a lot of difference one comma can make.
You also might want to check out “Eyes of the Dragon.” Its got the first appearence of Flagg.
Hearts in Atlantas has a Flagg reference. Well actually first of all it has a short story relating to the beams and breakers in the beginning of the book, but at the very end one of the characters mentions a character who could do sorta weird things, and he had the initials RF.
Unless I am extremely mistaken there is a passage in Wolves where Roland’s inner monologue is thinking about this and he certainly thinks Walter, Marten and Flagg are the same guy.
There’s a line in The Stand that always made me wonder. I’m not sure of the exact wording, but it says something to the effect that Flagg discovers he has magic powers. Does this mean that the world (dimension) of the Stand is where he’s born? Does he cross from that world into the other worlds? Or is it possibly not the same Flagg (dimensional versions or some such thing)?
If Flagg is Maerlyn the Ageless Stranger, aka Legion, then there is no way he was born in any iteration of our world. According to what I’ve read, he’s an End-Worlder who serves The Crimson King, not a human being at all. In fact, when he’s destroyed by the nuclear blast at the end of The Stand, he wakes up on some shore in another place. IOW, he cannot be destroyed by any conventional means, though I get the impression that Roland and his ka-tet (whoever is still left) will have to defeat/destroy him in order to set the Tower to right.
That’s why that line in The Stand makes me wonder.
Did he forget who he was before the novel took place, or possibly King wrote it before he envisioned the whole novel spanning universe thing he later created.
I guess I’m asking do you think this line should be there or is it something that was basically retconned out?