Define: Bittersweet

As I'm sitting here this morning scripting away at work, I'm trying to decide if the ending of 11/22/63 is happy or sad.  I finished the book last night around 2:00 AM.  The answer is both, of course, as most Stephen King books tend to be.  He's not a sympathetic writer -- he never has been, and I seriously doubt he ever will be.

The ending was bittersweet and, more to the point, basically it wasn't the ideal conclusion I would have hoped, but it could have been a lot worse.  In the last ten pages or so, the story got...well, bizarre.  Up until then, it was pretty grounded and based very much on fact.  Even the things that weren't true (in real life) were still based on fact or derived from analyzing the facts to make hypothetical assumptions.  It was believable.

I suppose you can't write a story about time travel without introducing some sort of fantastical elements.  The reader is going to want you to explain -how- your character went back in time in the first place, after all.  I won't go into it that much.

However, I do need to talk about the "Card Men" a little bit, because something has been on my mind ever since it was finally explained what their purpose really is.  At the beginning of the story, there was this hobo who was always around the area of the rabbit hole.  He had a card in his fedora, like a reporters press ticket.  It was yellow.  When Jake went through the rabbit hole the first time, it was orange.  When he went through the second time, it was black.  And the man had killed himself by cutting his own throat.

When Jake returned to the rabbit hole after saving Kennedy, another man was there.  With another card.  This one:  green.  Jake figured out that the card was sort of like those radiation badges that people at a nuclear power plant would wear.  Only these measured SANITY.  These "Card Men" were guardians of the rabbit holes, and staying near them slowly ate away at their sanity.  Green meant they were fine.  Yellow was okay.  Orange, and they were a bit mad.  And black...well, you know what happens then.

After it was explained that these men were guardians of the rabbit holes, and that they were human beings just like you or I, it occurred to me that they might be a certain kind of human being that we've seen in Stephen King's universe before:  The Breakers.

It's viable.  The Breakers are psychics, and their most notable appearance is within the Dark Tower novels.  They are slaves to the Crimson King, and are forced to use their telepathic abilities to slowly weaken and break the beams of the Dark Tower.  Thus their name:  Breakers.  It seems to me that guarding holes in time would be a job fitting their unique abilities.  There is no confirmation of this in the book, but I seriously doubt I'm the only person out there making this connection.

It also begs the question:  Who are they working for?  Are they still under the sway of the Crimson King at this point?  Roland took care of that, but had that happened yet when this story takes place?  I do not think they are, and I'll explain why:  The Crimson King's goal was to destroy the universe so he could rule the darkness.  That's why he wanted to break the beams of the Dark Tower and bring it down.  The Green Card Man said he was trying to -avoid- the universe, no REALITY, from unraveling.  If he was working for the Crimson King, he would have let that happen.  No, they are either on their own, or they are working for someone else.  Perhaps...the Turtle.  Or Gan himself.