s not destroy this type of epic legend per se, he brings social realism to the heroic journey as a means of demythifying the heroic ideal.This undercutting of the heroic ideal and subversion of the form and images of the epic adds to the desolation in both physical and mental landscape, in that the bleak wasteland through which Roland travels on his quest for the Dark Tower represents his own hopeless, unheroic state of mind. Roland attempts to attribute sinister and fiendish qualities to a place almost entirely devoid of life. In his visions of hellish horses and rivers full of bodies, we see only his anger and despair made manifest. The horse, though ugly, is not evil, and yet Roland exclaims: “I never saw a brute I hated so“. Even the unassuming rivulet is “unexpected as a serpent comes” and “so pretty yet so spiteful!“ Similarly the cripple is an object of hate, but at the same time he is Roland himself in a different form. He has the same “malicious eye”- the instrument Roland uses to view all around him, and in different ways both men are crippled; the old man physically and Roland imaginatively. When Roland scorns his guide, he really expresses anger at himself for he knows he will inevitably fail to conquer whatever evil lurks at the Dark Tower. His sense of fate is represented by the fact the way back is lost almost immediately: “the safe road, ‘twas gone! grey plain all round!”In contrast to Tennyson’s “Mariana”, in which the physical world reflects the emotions of the narrator, the external reality of this world is the internal emotional reality of Roland. The wasteland exists within Roland’s mind. The poem can be read as an allegory, functioning both as an imaginative journey, and a journey through the imagination. Roland’s acquiescence to death, his frustration in his journey, and his own disappointment in himself, all combine ...
