The primary protagonist of the novel (and The Dark Tower series), Roland Deschain is a tall, lean man of indeterminate age with a chiseled face and blue eyes. He’s depicted like a movie cowboy and is distinctly patterned after actor Clint Eastwood in Westerns such as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966). Often referred to as “the gunslinger,” Roland wears his gun belt and holsters around his waist and is a lightning-quick shot. His world is Mid-World, the only realm from which the Dark Tower is reachable. Mid-World is close to the readers’ world but is far behind technologically. As a gunslinger, Roland knows High Speech, the sacred language of warriors, but also uses Low Speech, or the common tongue. Both languages are close to real-world English but contain new elements and words. Roland’s expressions appear old-fashioned and idiomatic, such as “You have forgotten the face of your father” (xx). Roland represents the Death card that the man in black drew in the first novel in the series, The Gunslinger. This implies that Roland will deal death to the unjust and the evil.

In The Drawing of the Three, Roland is ill for most of the plot, having lost two of the fingers of his right hand as well as his right big toe in a creature attack and sustained an infection.