Knowing: Red Dead Redemption and the Inversion of Paradise Lost

The ways that Red Dead Redemption 2 inverts Paradise Lost’s themes about attaining knowledge.

All posts on this site feature detailed discussion of literary allusions in Red Dead Redemption 2, and as such contain unmarked major and minor spoilers for the game, and occasionally the eventual fates of some characters in Red Dead Redemption. Read at your own risk.

TW: Discussion of alcoholism and psychological/emotional abuse.

Paradise Lost, as one of the most essential influences of Red Dead Redemption 2, naturally contributes more than characters to the game’s narrative. Like the poem, one of RDR2’s central themes involves gaining knowledge. However, the game and the poem come to divergent conclusions about that concept. What Milton condemns, RDR2 declares imperative.

Intelligence and knowledge are nebulous topics. Many types of intelligence exist: some people learn languages easily but struggle with logic, or have great intuition but are lousy at math. Societies value certain types of intelligence, like the sciences, over certain others, like the arts. We often incorrectly perceive intelligence based on race, gender, disability, class, nationality, education, and other factors. Finally, “intelligence” can mean both the aptitude to acquire knowledge and the application of that knowledge.

Knowledge, too, is a little slippery. Lenny Summers has more formal education than Arthur Morgan — but Arthur has the experience to know that the stagecoach in Lenny’s companion activity may be a setup. Beyond that, knowledge can mean something more profound, something approaching wisdom. In Red Dead Redemption 2, the important type of knowledge is self-knowledge. The important type of intelligence is the kind that allows the characters to accurately read the people around them and the situations that they’re in.

Dutch Van der Linde’s False Image

Dutch Van der Linde has neither of these, and it is these deficits that cause the gang most of their problems. Dutch can appear more intelligent than he really is for the usual reasons: he’s male. He’s white. He’s charismatic and eloquent, although many of his words are borrowed – not only borrowed, but borrowed from just author. Intelligent people, if this is the form their intelligence takes, don’t just read and regurgitate one writer. They read many books and synthesize the knowledge they gain from different minds and different ways of thinking. Dutch is perfectly content to let one other person — Evelyn Miller — do his thinking for him. He borrows ideas, too — even leaving the country isn’t his idea. In camp dialog, Uncle suggests that they might become farmers in Australia, one of the countries Dutch considers moving the gang to (Horseshoe Overlook). (Uncle, with his disastrous plans and demands that people cheer up and keep the faith, is just Dutch if Dutch had a smaller ego.)

Dutch himself, no doubt, thinks he’s the smartest man in any room, unless Evelyn Miller is there. But that’s the problem: like Arthur, he doesn’t know himself. He thinks he’s a good bad guy, a rebel with a cause. He thinks his motives are as pure as his ideals. He’s a conman who bought into his own con. When he’s confronted with the fact that he was, himself, conned, he freezes. His self-image can’t survive it. The last thing he ever says to Arthur is simply “I.” That’s what Dutch is: ego.

It’s quite possible Dutch misreads Micah Bell and Angelo Bronte so badly because he relates to them, and his understanding of who he is himself is so flawed. At the beginning of “A Quiet Time,” he asks Arthur, “You think I can’t see past [Micah’s] bluster to the heart inside?” That is exactly what Dutch can’t do. If you aren’t honest with yourself, if you don’t know yourself, you can’t accurately read the world around you. It will skew everything you see. You’ll end up doing boneheaded things like robbing a trolley station (of all places) on nothing but the word of a man who all but openly despises you.

Although Dutch excels at short cons and extemporaneous acts of violence, nearly every plan he implements goes wrong: the gang hangs around Blackwater too long, and, as Hosea feared, they draw the attention of the law (Arthur’s journal, entries before Colter chapter). The ferry job is a disaster. Robbing Cornwall’s train was Colm’s bad plan; the real play there would have been to let Colm rob it and let him draw the heat from the Pinkertons. That plan isn’t executed properly, either: Dutch sends Bill, his least intelligent follower, to set the dynamite, and it doesn’t blow. Dutch doesn’t do adequate recon for the trolley job, so he doesn’t realize that of course there isn’t any money there. He claims they can sneak back in Lemoyne because no one will expect it; Micah is picked up within hours and turns informant. When he goads Eagle Flies and his friends into trying to humiliate the army, the group that shows up is larger than they’re expecting. Dutch’s plan to rob the last train is botched: the train doesn’t stop when it’s supposed to, and John is abandoned, contributing to the final splintering of the gang: Javier was there, and although he doesn’t have the courage to stand against Dutch, when the Pinktertons attack Beaver Hollow, he flees, and so does Bill¹.

The reason Dutch says he has a plan so often is because he’s deeply insecure about the fact that he can’t make one. An example of a plan is: we will leave for Tahiti on September 18th. This is how we will avoid detection leaving. This is what we will do if we are detected. These are the documents the country will require for us to enter. This is what Tahiti is like: the government, the people, the languages, the climate. This is where we will live and how we’ll earn money.

Dutch has very few ideas and no plan. As events force him to confront the fact that his concept of himself is fundamentally flawed, he doesn’t go mad, he gets angry. Essentially, he throws a prolonged temper tantrum. He feels deeply insulted and takes it out on everyone around him. That’s why he kills Bronte. His anger is a force, to be sure, and his emotions have carried him through before, but it’s not working anymore. Emotion can be a powerful tool for gaining knowledge, but only if you’re willing, and able, to see yourself clearly. Dutch is not. His anger makes him stupider, and it makes him vulnerable. At Horseshoe Overlook, when Micah tries to suck up to Dutch, Dutch can see his machinations quite clearly. By Beaver Hollow, Dutch is falling for Micah’s lies because they reinforce his fracturing idea of himself. He’d rather believe that there’s a rat in the gang than that he isn’t as smart as he thinks he is.

Red Dead Redemption 2, Paradise Lost, and Knowledge

Ignorance of self and the people around you will lead you into a wilderness of foolishness. But the wrong kind of knowledge is no better, RDR2 argues. Here, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Paradise Lost are in agreement. In the poem, the knowledge of good and evil is forbidden to Adam and Eve. The archangel Raphael explains to Adam:

But knowledge is as food, and needs no less
Her temperance over appetite, to know
In measure what the mind may well contain;
Oppresses else with surfeit, and soon turns
Wisdom to folly, as nourishment to wind.

Paradise Lost VII.126-130

Too much knowledge, Raphael is saying, will make you foolish instead of wise, just as eating too much will give you gas. Red Dead Redemption 2 borrows this theme from Paradise Lost in several storylines. In “America,” Evelyn Miller asks if people have been made “into thinkers who can never quite think for we have been denuded of the ability to feel? Was this the method by which the Serpent and the Apple removed us from Eden? Not by letting us see, but by allowing us to think and thereby forever stopping us feeling?” Feeling is an important part of self-knowledge. Miller argues that thinking too much — too much of the wrong kind of knowledge — cuts us off from the right kind of knowledge because it cuts us off from feeling.

We see elsewhere in RDR2 that knowledge isn’t always a good thing. In the stranger mission “Mercies of Knowledge,” scientist Andrew Bell III (an unholy combination of Agent Andrew Milton and Micah Bell III’s names) attempts to create a more “humane” method of execution, which ends up killing Bell and torturing his victim. Someone with more profound knowledge would have realized that the inhumanity is in killing anyone at all. Marko Dragic (a name for which “or dark magic” is an anagram), too, is killed by his invention, as are various inventors of flying machines found at Points of Interest and in one of the magic lantern shows. All of these events are instances of hubris, of people infringing on God’s territory: taking life, creating it, flying.

Where the game’s argument on the theme of knowledge grows puzzling is in its treatment of Karen Jones. While the gang stays at Shady Belle, she reflects on their life in camp dialog. She has the perspicacity to realize just how dire their situation is, but instead of enlightening her, it dooms her, making her issues with alcohol addiction and depression worse. Karen is one of the most intelligent characters in the gang: she plans and executes their second-most financially successful robbery (Bill tries to take credit for it. Zero women are surprised). She acquires the information, assesses it correctly, does the recon, makes the plan, and recruits the right people for the job. But Karen also has the kind of knowledge the Evelyn Miller argues is so crucial: she feels deeply. She has the emotional intelligence and insight to try to help Molly, whom she’s always fought with (Shady Belle). When Jack is missing, Karen is the one by Abigail’s side, supporting her (Shady Belle). After Susan kills Molly, Karen confronts her, saying Molly didn’t break the rules and lied because she was in love (Beaver Hollow). This intuitive assessment is entirely correct. None of this knowledge or intelligence is the kind RDR2 condemns elsewhere.

On a practical level, Karen’s alcoholism serves the same purpose that Hosea and Lenny dying does: it gets one of the most intelligent and clear-sighted characters out of commission so the disaster can unfold. On a thematic level, her character arc is muddled and unclear. Arthur, who ends up seeking knowledge, dies, but he doesn’t die because of his knowledge or intelligence. Quite the opposite: he dies because he ignorantly followed Dutch. In Karen’s case, knowledge seems to doom her, and it isn’t clear why — especially since Reverend Swanson, who is a far more selfish and less intelligent person, is miraculously saved from his addiction by praying with a nun². One has to wonder whether Rockstar’s oft-noted biases against women in general and sex workers in particular is interfering with their ability to tell their story well.

Power in Knowledge

While God, in Paradise Lost, forbids Adam and Eve certain types of knowledge in order to protect them, in Red Dead Redemption 2, Dutch doesn’t want Arthur to gain knowledge because he wants to be able to control him. What Dutch wants is power. “He wants,” Uncle says, “to be an American king.” As his double, Uncle understands Dutch very well. This observation is so insightful, and Dutch resents it so much for the way that it exposes him, that he tells him, “Right now, I’d like to kill you” (Horseshoe Overlook). Molly, moments before she’s murdered, sarcastically calls Dutch “God” and “your majesty.” Dutch likes to call Arthur his “son,” but that is a ridiculous relationship to claim with someone who’s probably 10 years younger than you at the most³. With that rhetorical move, he creates power for himself out of nothing.

Arthur threatens Dutch’s desire for power because he is, at least in some ways, smarter than Dutch. Unlike Dutch, Arthur correctly analyzes the situation they’re in: he points out in “Just a Social Call” that with the chaos they’ve been causing, they don’t need a rat (they do, in fact, have one, but not until after Dutch and Hosea have already doomed them). He spots flaws in plans. He pays attention to important details. He writes and draws beautifully. He’s curious about the world and the people around him. He questions things, even things he’s believed most of his life.

Of course Arthur has foolish moments, as do we all. He can be shockingly gullible for someone raised by two conmen. And his intelligence, along with the rest of his self-image, has been actively impaired by Dutch. It’s precisely when he asks intelligent questions in “A Rage Unleashed” and “My Last Boy” that Dutch tells him he’s being an idiot. Arthur, apparently used to this treatment, doesn’t object. Dutch abuses Arthur using the technique of intermittent reinforcement: vituperatively telling Arthur he’s garbage, then at random intervals telling him he’s his son, his brother, his best friend. At the end of “American Distillation,” Dutch will either insult Arthur’s riding skills (if the player loses the race) or moodily tell him “I never knew you were quite so good at running away” (if the player wins). A few moments later, he tells him, “I was gonna say you’re like a son to me, but you’re more than that.”

Dutch wants Arthur to stay unthinking and unaware in service to Dutch’s ego. The knowledge he forbids Arthur is self-knowledge, and therefore the process of what foundational psychiatrist Carl Jung called individuation. For Jung, this was “the process of self realisation, the discovery and experience of meaning and purpose in life; the means by which one finds oneself and becomes who one really is” (Schmidt). When Arthur finally begins this process, Dutch finds it unbearable, almost literally maddening, because it means Arthur starts to really stand up to Dutch for the first time in his life. When Arthur finally asserts himself, we see Dutch’s humanity fall away entirely; he is never more dangerous than when he says, softly, eyes flat and dead as a shark’s, “‘Insist’?”

The tragedy of Red Dead Redemption 2, and the reason the ending feels so traumatic, is not that Arthur dies. It’s that Arthur dies before he can complete the process of “becoming who [he] really is.” Schmidt continues: “[Individuation] depends upon the interplay and synthesis of opposites e.g. conscious and unconscious, personal and collective, psyche and soma, divine and human, life and death.” No one is all light, and very few people are all darkness. Forces like that have to be brought into balance in the mind. His own duality is one of the things Arthur cannot come to terms with before he dies, and so he doesn’t die at peace: all the choices the player is offered only affect whether his death will be scored to a major key, or a minor one.

New here? Visit the Table of Contents to read the essays in order, or the Index to explore the site by topic. New essays are published Wednesdays at 1 p.m. E.T./10 a.m. P.T. Sharing the site is always appreciated!

1. Javier leaves to go after John with Dutch, Micah, and Joe. When they return and Dutch says John was killed, Javier is in the back, saying nothing. After the Pinkertons arrive in “Red Dead Redemption,” as soon as the player regains camera control, using Photo Mode to look around reveals that Javier and Bill appear to have not just fled, but despawned. Poof. ↩︎
2. Mentioned in camp dialog with Herr Strauss at Beaver Hollow. He doesn’t name the nun, but it is presumably supposed to be Sister Calderón. ↩︎
3. Arthur is roughly 33-36 (dialog in “The New South,” “Eastward Bound,” and “The Aftermath of Genesis”); Hosea is around 55 (newspaper article “Saint Denis Robbers Still on the Run”). Dutch looks, and seems, closer in age to Arthur than to Hosea, and even Hosea would be young to be Arthur’s father. Dutch has an “official” age in 1899 – 44 – but since it’s from a tertiary text, it can’t be relied on, especially as the same text would make Bill Williamson 17 in RDR2. However, 44 does match Dutch’s appearance, given that people aged much more quickly back then. Dutch may think well of himself, but he certainly couldn’t have fathered a child when he was 8. ↩︎

Bibliography