Butcher’s Crossing is an 1960 novel by John Williams about a young man named (hilariously) William Andrews, who leaves Harvard in the 1870s to go West and experience the parts of the country untouched by European colonizers. In part, he’s inspired to do so by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most prominent figure of the Transcendentalist movement. Another leader in the literary movement, Henry David Thoreau, is part of the basis for the character Evelyn Miller.
The traces of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian that appear in RDR2 are subtler than Rockstar's usual bold and underlined references. The novel's impact on Red Dead Redemption was second only to that of Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. In contrast, Blood Meridian makes itself felt throughout RDR2 in the horrific violence, the bleakness, and the bitter irony, but most of the similarities aren’t specific enough to claim them as absolute allusions. A few are certain:
When considering race and anti-Black racism, Black perspectives are the most vital. That said, too often, we act as though being white is an automatic, default, or neutral position instead of considering the precise ways in which racism distorts white perspectives and beliefs. RDR2's portrayal of the white perspective is unconsidered and obscures historical realities. Arthur's demonstrable ignorance of white peoples’ prevalent attitudes in “Preaching Forgiveness as He Went” and “No Good Deed” denies the realities of the time and is totally unbelievable: in no way were white supremacist acts of violence, let alone beliefs, confined to the South.
An unfortunate feature of American storytelling is the “anti-racist” text that is, itself, racist. These pieces ostensibly speak against racism, but the authors haven't done the difficult work of confronting their own false and negative beliefs about the people they're writing about. As a result, they uphold or create harmful stereotypes, like the white savior or the Uncle Tom. One such text is Quentin Tarantino's film Django Unchained, which probably gave RDR2's writing team the idea for a Western set in the South. Having chosen that questionable inspiration, they chose another with similar flaws: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
If any aspect of RDR2 is perfect, it's the light. Rich and golden, the sunsets and dawns immerse the player in the game's themes — nostalgia for a lost world; wonder at nature — drawing on the senses to create poignant emotion. That light, itself, is an allusion to a 19th-century artist who in turn inspired one of the game's most charming minor NPCs.
Learn the story behind RDR2's Strange Statues, plus much more.
As should be apparent by now, RDR2’s use of literature ranges from deep and extensive to brief and glancing. Sometimes, the writers allude to a work broadly rather than dealing with its themes.
Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, is the first science fiction novel. Famously, it was conceived as part of a contest between Shelley, her husband Percy, and their friends Lord Byron and John William Polidori. The group was staying in Geneva, where Byron rented a house called Villa Diodati. They were “delighted to learn that Milton had once stayed there, an astonishingly good omen for this group who by now saw themselves as fallen angels, like Milton’s Satan: rebellious and misunderstood” (Gordon 168).
