Comments on: meta-fiction: On Stephen King and the Dark Tower. (Spoilers)

By: asiaaaaaa

asiaaaaaa — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 01:11:46 +0000

i just want to say that i am in love with DT. OK.

By: elena

elena — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 06:08:48 +0000

King admitted that the direction of the book changed after his near-fatal accident. I remember reading he had the metafiction notion all along but no clear idea of how it was going to play out until he was more or less forced to sit and just FINISH the thing. Many writers of ambtious multipart series have this problem. GRRMartin has run into the same wall.

By: J. T. Glover

J. T. Glover — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:50:28 +0000

I’d never thought of the revised first edition as an iteration, simply as a revision. Hmm, hmm, and hmmmm. Have to think about that a bit. It’s so strange the mental gymnastics we go through to think about how to understand a series that took about 25 years to write and changed with his style, even if the conclusion of the final book invites us to do so.

I don’t know what the literary term for this is (if there is a term for it), but I admire those situations where an author frames a story in such a way that its flaws are understood as part of the nature of the story itself. The most recent example of this I’ve read was Theodore Judson’s Fitzpatrick’s War, which is a memoir from a soldier hundreds of years down the road, annotated a century or so after the fact by a scholar. Lot’s of room in there for a reader to say to himself/herself “well, [x] is a problem, but it fits the conventions of memoir,” or something like that. I guess any well-written narrator can serve to subsume flaws and gaps as artifacts of his/her viewpoint.

Neat post.

By: corprew

corprew — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 08:32:58 +0000

Although I’m not sure to what extent you can have spoilers on a book that’s been in print for this period of time, honestly.

Also, it’s the sled.