Insult you – God forbid, it’s all the matter of my wrong (as often happens) word choice; the natural antonym to “honest” does seem to be “dishonest”, but, as God is my witness, I didn’t imagine you in this - antonymous - position; also, I am afraid, the core word itself was wrong, and I still fail to find any better. Not really an “honest” reader, no, but someone who identifies with his reading to the point of starting an additional life every time he opens a new book; thus, it would be as futile for him to try to escape these fatal words, “the end”, as it would be for us to expect to cheat death indefinitely.
Especially when a book is Opus Magnum, the crown achievement and the big total of an author’s life, and
especially if the book is so essentially intricate as TDT is.
I already bored everyone by saying it over and over, but I will say it again because I feel it is true – the Dark Tower saga is a simulation of the multiverse on
many levels, and being essentially complex entails being formally convoluted; that’s why using the words “games” and “tricks” in any derogative way was the farthest thing from my mind. He makes the world for us, and he makes us live in it; at tmes he plays with us as God sometimes does, and Devil does all the time.
It is human to pray for the cup to be taken away. It is understandable to want to escape death at least this one time, - only it is there anyway, and no life is complete without this final period mark.
In this case King himself made this prayer of the chalice for us – it was his way of warning that Golgotha lies ahead. I am sure King wasn’t disappointed by what he wrote; nor was he afraid of disappointing his reader. He was warning that the last pages would be incredibly hard for the reader, as they – I believe – were for the writer; he was giving us illusion of choice, of a possibility of slipping out through back door; but he knew that ultimately there was no such thing as escape, and if he drank the cup, we, his readers, wouldn't shirk drinking it with him.
(I do so hope that the above - however incoherent - has at least in some way shown that our understanding of stories and storytelling is not really so different...
)