Read: The Waste Lands–“Key and Rose,” parts 1-16

I realize it’s a mug’s game to criticize a depiction of time-travel paradoxes by saying “hey, that’s not how that would work!”, but, well, hey, that’s not how that would work!

Roland’s bifurcating memories make sense. He was doing his quest thing and came across Jake, who’d been killed in our world and then brought over into Roland’s world. Various things that Roland and Jake did together, including Roland allowing Jake to fall into that pit in the mountains and die, enabled Roland to catch the man in black. This in turn enabled Roland to enter our world. While he was there he prevented Jake from being killed.

Boom! Paradox. The only way Roland even got to the point where he could prevent Jake from being killed is for Jake to have been killed. He’s running around as an impossible man, continuing a timeline that he himself has just prevented from starting. As the storyteller you’ve got a couple of options at this point: You can have Roland’s entire post-meeting-Jake timeline fade or blink from existence and start over at the point of origin, thereby retconning all that stuff, OR you can say “Okay, the post-meeting-Jake timeline still exists for Roland, so that he COULD stop Jake from being killed, but now that’s ruptured his brain and he’s got two sets of memories.” That’s what King did.

BUT, then there’s Jake’s situation. In the original timeline, he got killed in our world and brought over to Roland’s world. He and Roland had some adventures, and then Roland let him die. Because of all that, Roland had the chance to enter our world, and why he was there he stopped Jake from being killed. So Jake continues living in our world.

Where’s the paradox there? In the original timeline, he died and got brought over to Roland-land, and in the new one he didn’t because Roland hijacked the body of the guy who pushed him. It’s the equivalent of Roland going back in time to tell HIMSELF not to do something. THAT Roland wouldn’t have two sets of memories; neither should this Jake. It would be one thing if the Jake that had gone into Roland-world was still around–HE’D have the two sets of memories. But this one never went there, never did any of that stuff. Why does HE have bifurcated memories?

And this is without any of the business about our-world-Jake “remembering” the circumstances of his own death even before they WOULD have happened in the original timeline. That’s not a time-travel issue, that’s a magic issue, pertaining (I guess) to King’s collective-destiny concept ka-tet. Now that I think of it, that shows up in a lot of his books, that feeling that you’re with the people you’re supposed to be with and doing the things you’re supposed to be doing–it certainly happened with the kids in It and with Nick & Tom and Stu & Glen in The Stand. So in all likelihood that’s the explanation for the time-travel wonkiness too: Jake “remembers” what happened to him even though he never was never advanced far enough along this timeline to really-remember it at all because it was his ka and the continuing of his life along a never-got-killed, never-went-into-another-world timeline wasn’t. But if you’re used to thinking about these things along the lines of how they worked in Terminator or Back to the Future or whatever, man, does it knock you out of the action.

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