Stephen King's writing is renowned for its recurring themes and intricate mythology. One of the most fascinating motifs is the number 19, which appears throughout his works, particularly in the Dark Tower series. This article delves into the reasons behind King's fascination with 19, exploring its personal significance and its role in the larger narrative of The Dark Tower.
There's a fascinating motif that appears again and again throughout the books and stories of Stephen King , and that's the number 19 . Longtime readers know that in-universe lore runs vast and deep throughout Stephen King 's interconnected universe, and his built mythology has constantly been added to and revised over the years.
Some of that has been to fix continuity errors, some of it has been down to an author tweaking older work he wasn't happy with, and some of it has simply been the inevitable byproduct of an output that spans so many books and short stories. Despite the changes, however, there are certain themes that have remained constant, like his readers. The everyman protagonist is synonymous with the Stephen King novel at this point. Recurring themes of addiction, childhood fear and wonder, redemption from traumatic pasts, and others have left their indelible stamps in Stephen King's books. But smaller patterns are also tattooed across his pages, including a numerical one that has become the most fascinating Easter egg: the number 19.The Number 19 Has Deep Meaning For Stephen King's Personal Life It Was Both A Start & An End For Him There are a few real-life reasons that King has threaded 19 through so much of his work, both confirmed and perhaps embellished. King has said he was 19 years old when he began working on his first novel. While some think that means Carrie, it was actually the earliest version of The Gunslinger. It's well-known that Robert Browning's epic poem,'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came' inspired King to write the first book in the Dark Tower series after he read it in college. However, King claiming he began writing it when he was 19 may very well be an embellishment on his part to better fit into the mythos of the 19 motif. While Browning's poem is the strongest influence, King was also influenced by Arthurian legend, J.R.R. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings, Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns, William Butler Yeats' poems,'The Tower' and'The Black Tower,' T.S. Eliot's'The Waste Land,' and countless other works of art in the writing of The Dark Tower series. What's definite, though, is that the number 19 has ties to the most traumatic moment in King's life: his infamous accident, which happened on June 19, 1999, and left him nearly dead, bad enough that he had to be flown by air ambulance to a trauma center in Lewiston, Maine. Books 1-4 of the Dark Tower series were written before his accident, but books 5-7 were written after. King has explained at length on multiple occasions that, after the date of the accident that changed his life forever, both the writing of the second half of the series and the number 19 were inextricable from his accident and its aftermath.The Number 19 Pops Up Throughout The Dark Tower Series The Number 19 Is Tied To Fate In That Universe Close Unsurprisingly, then, the 19 motif is most directly linked to The Dark Tower. While, again, the pattern didn't start until The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla, after the accident, he retroactively wove it into the revised and expanded edition of The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, when it was re-released in 2003. The mystical number holds deep meaning in the world of The Dark Tower, popping up everywhere for Roland and his ka-tet, from branches and twigs that seem to make the shape of the number to characters whose names are exactly 19 letters long. Dark Tower readers know that ka is the force that binds all things together and guides all things and all events. In other words, it's fate. It's explained why 19 keeps appearing in the Dark Tower books, although not in detail. All that's known is that the Keystone World - that is,'our' world - has a'ka' of 19. Dark Tower readers know that ka is the force that binds all things together and guides all things and all events. In other words, it's fate; the word'ka-tet,' for example, is the word for a group of people who are bound together by destiny, whether permanently or for a short time
Stephen King The Dark Tower Number 19 Mythology Ka Fate Literary Motifs
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