Does this first-person narrative alter this perspective? Does Roland’s narration of a folktale affect how we see him? What about the circumstances under which he narrates this folktale?Ĥ. How does this switch to first person in “The Skin-Man” affect how you perceive Roland? Do you feel you have learned more about his personality? His soul? Roland is often presented to us as distant, reserved, and emotionally cool. In “The Skin-Man,” Roland recounts an autobiographical tale in the first person, and then in “The Wind Through the Keyhole,” he narrates a folktale. However, in The Wind Through the Keyhole, Roland becomes the narrator. All of the Dark Tower novels are told predominately in the third person, through the voice of a narrator. What are these three narratives? How do they relate to one another? How does Stephen King manage to link them together so that the stories transition smoothly, one into another?ģ. The Wind Through the Keyhole is composed of three intertwined narratives. What is the literal significance of this title? What is the symbolic significance of this title? Why do you think Stephen King chose to name his novel after this folktale? Once you discovered where this title came from, did it affect how you read or interpreted the novel’s three intertwined narratives?Ģ. This folktale, in turn, was part of a collection of stories entitled Magic Tales of the Eld.

In the novel The Wind Through the Keyhole, we discover that the book takes its title from a Mid-World folktale with the same name. The Wind Through the Keyhole Reading Group Guide from The Dark Tower: The Complete Concordanceġ. “Man and boy, girl and woman, we live for them.”Īnd stories like The Wind Through the Keyhole live for us with Stephen King’s fantastical magic that “creates the kind of fully imagined fictional landscapes a reader can inhabit for days at a stretch” ( The Washington Post). Roland, himself only a teenager, calms the boy by reciting a story from the Book of Eld that his mother used to read to him at bedtime, “The Wind through the Keyhole.” “A person’s never too old for stories,” he says to Bill. Sent by his father to investigate evidence of a murderous shape-shifter, Roland takes charge of Bill Streeter, a brave but terrified boy who is the sole surviving witness to the beast’s most recent slaughter. Roland tells a tale from his early days as a gunslinger, in the guilt-ridden year following his mother’s death. This Russian doll of a novel, a story within a story within a story, visits Roland and his ka-tet as a ferocious, frigid storm halts their progress along the Path of the Beam. The Wind Through the Keyhole is a sparkling contribution to the series that can be placed between Dark Tower IV and Dark Tower V. In his New York Times bestselling The Wind Through the Keyhole, Stephen King returns to the spectacular territory of the Dark Tower fantasy saga to tell a story about gunslinger Roland Deschain in his early days.

The wind and the keyhole