Final Thoughts on the Dark Tower

Dear Wal,

A week-ish ago I told you I had barely scraped the surface of  Stephan King's final installment of his series The Dark Tower. Well, I come to you today to tell you that I've finally finished it. It's over. This is the end. Roland finally reached his tower and climbed to the top.
And guess what he found there.
Spoilers lay here. Beware.
I mean, seriously, if you don't want the entire series ruined for you, don't read on.

Roland's life played out on every level of the tower as he ascended: each event signified by smells, sounds, faces, voices, mementos. And at the top? At first, I thought it might be Stephan King himself, there to tell Roland some terrible, disheartening truth. However, earlier in the book that idea was squashed. Then I thought it might be Gan, or God, but Roland described the Tower as Gan himself. And I thought that it might be Roland's death. Frankly, I had no idea. For once in the course of this very long series, I had no idea what was going to happen. I stuck to the idea of death because, naturally, the top should symbolize the end, right? Not so, for ka is a wheel. No, instead, Roland opens the door to the room at the top of the tower only to find that there is no room at all, but an expanse of desert. The very desert that The Gunslinger opens on, with those fateful words: "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." Yes, the story repeats. Only, its slightly different. This time, Roland remembered to grab Cuthbert's horn at the battle of Jericho Hill. The last battle for Gilead. Of course, Roland doesn't remember anything from the previous journey he just made.
How poetic, that Roland, the wanderer, the seeker, doesn't get an end. He just goes on wandering, goes on seeking, and repeats the classic quest narrative again and again. And what a horrible fate. Roland goes on. Roland always goes on, and in the end he's always alone.
But...I have to say this is something of a creative cop-out, if a brilliant one. What Roland found at the top of the tower was just a tad bit disappointing  It makes everything he has gone through seem pointless. It makes the whole series seem pointless. But when you really start to think about it, to really try to wrap your head around it, you can't. Throughout the series, King has asserted that Roland's world is as close to real as you can get on the page. He has intertwined it every step of the way with a close second to what we like to call the real world. Does what Roland found at the top of the tower mean that everything he did, his entire world, wasn't-at least in the context of the fictional universe King creates-real? Were Suze, Jake and Eddie really a part of Roland's life or just a mirage? Does he meet new people, or does he meet the same people every time? Speaking of time, does Roland simply go back in time? Is he just saving the same world over and over again? Or better yet, is he saving another parallel universe? I think he is. I think he's doomed to walk every universe, every slightly altered earth, until he's saved every Beam in every universe and reached the top of every tower. Problem is, the multiverse is infinite.
Crazy, right?
Unlike everything else in this series, this ending just refuses to click. It's probably going to be teasing my brain for weeks.

/endrant

P.S. HEY GUYS!! THERE COULD BE MOVIES SOON!! And there are also comic books. HA, you thought I was going to read them? Nope.