In a Dark Wood: Dante’s Inferno in RDR2, Part I

The Van der Linde gang’s journey through the world of RDR2 is structured by Dante’s fictional journey through hell in the Inferno.

All articles 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.

A note on the text: I used Robert and Jean Hollander’s excellent translation. It’s possible there are other allusions (in mission titles, for instance) that I didn’t notice if the writers used one of many other translations.

Eden, in Red Dead Redemption 2, is the natural, unindustrialized world. However, the writers create a stark juxtaposition by using Dante Alighieri’s Inferno — meaning “Hell” — to define and describe the Van der Linde gang’s journey through this Edenic world. No matter how beautiful their surroundings, their circumstances make their environments punishing. As Milton’s Satan says, “Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell” (IV.75). The gang brings their misery with them.

Inferno is the beginning of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which tells the story of Dante (as a character) journeying through hell, purgatory, and heaven. Next week, I’ll begin to discuss how each camp represents a specific part of Dante’s vision of Hell. For now, here’s how the writers used the Inferno to shape RDR2’s story.

The Dark Wood

This section is the only part of Dante’s journey that the game’s timeline presents out of order. Dante opens his epic, “Midway in the journey of our life/I came to myself in a dark wood,/for the straight way was lost” (I.1-3). He has left the proper path. He’s frightened, lost, alone. Three animals appear and threaten Dante: a leopard, a lion¹, and a she-wolf². It’s this last of the Inferno animals that’s significant in RDR2. One common reading is that the wolf represents sins of incontinence (Hollander 16-17). These sins are lust, gluttony, avarice, and anger/sullenness. They are less offensive to God than sins of malice because they aren’t rooted in a desire to hurt other people (as Dante’s guide Virgil will explain in Canto XI). In another interpretation of the animals, the she-wolf represents the specific sin of avarice, or greed. As you might guess, both of these readings are meaningful in the game.

Over the course of RDR2, Arthur Morgan’s condition comes to echo Dante’s in the Inferno. Like Dante, he’s technically “midway in the journey of our life,” which just means that he’s in his mid-thirties — Psalms says that a human lifetime is 70 years (Hollander 12). But it’s in the spiritual parallels between Arthur and Dante that we find real meaning. Arthur, like Dante, is lost, and not quite sure how he came to be that way. The dark wood reflects, “to some readers, the condition of Eden after the Fall” (Hollander 13). As I’ve argued before, Arthur’s Fall, like Adam and Eve’s, is from ignorance into knowledge. The difference from Christian dogma is that the game presents this as a good, if painful and sad, thing. It isn’t until Chapters 5 and 6 that Arthur finds himself in this state.

We know we’re in the Dark Wood when we see the she-wolf — which happens in “The Veteran III.” Hamish Sinclair has been regaling Arthur with war stories when he sees the she-wolf out his window. In the Inferno, after the she-wolf threatens Dante, the spirit of Virgil — author of the war epic the Aeneid — appears and tells him that if he wants to escape the wolf, he’ll have to make the journey through Hell. Although it’s not uncommon for RDR2’s main-story missions to have time leaps, “The Veteran III” is one of very few side quests that changes the time of day. It does this so that when Hamish and Arthur hunt the she-wolf, it’s dark. The connection to Dante’s Dark Wood is further stressed when Hamish says the wolf went “into the woodland.” The she-wolf leads Arthur and Hamish through this Dark Wood into a trap, and they’re almost killed by a vicious pack of wolves.

This is the story of Arthur’s past and a warning for the future. His failure to obey his own conscience — being ruled by the she-wolf incontinence — resulted in his contracting tuberculosis. Arthur writes in his journal that he hates recovering debts for Herr Strauss: “The whole thing revolted me/my part” (entry after “Money Lending and Other Sins III”). And yet he does it anyway, resulting in what the game frames as a kind of divine (or at least karmic) punishment.

Micah Bell’s attack on Arthur echoes the attack of the final wolf in “The Veteran III.” This is especially apparent if Arthur goes back for the money. Going back for the money is a display of avarice (again, the she-wolf is also often interpreted as a representation of that sin). Arthur’s journey from where he splits up with John back to Beaver Hollow is through the dark woods, rendered eerie by Micah’s voice calling to Arthur from nowhere. (Four wolves attack Arthur and Hamish after the she-wolf is killed; Arthur and John are chased and shot at by four men — Dutch, Joe, Cleet, Micah — in “Red Dead Redemption” after Susan is killed.)

Compare the attacks in the video below (warning: loud).

Next week: I’ll begin my tour showing how the camps and their environs represent the Circles of Hell in the Inferno.

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1. There is a lion in “He’s British, Of Course,” but it doesn’t appear to have the same symbolic significance as the she-wolf. The leopard is a “lonza” (a hybrid leopard/lion [Hollander 15]), not “giaguaro,” which is the name of the Legendary Panther. However, since leopards are not endemic to North America, perhaps the fact that the panther’s name is given in Italian is significant, especially since the player has to complete 9 Master Hunter Challenges for the animal to even spawn. (The lion possibly represents violence; the leopard, fraud.) ↩︎
2. These animals are from the Book of Jeremiah, which RDR2 also alludes to extensively (Hollander 16). ↩︎

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