Re-Mythologizing the Frontier, Jungian Archetypes and the American West in Red Dead Redemption 2

Abstract

This abstract explores how Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2 () operates as a site for re-mythologization, critically engaging the foundational American Frontier Myth through the innovative platform of the open-world video game. Anchoring this analysis in Jungian Archetypal Criticism, this study asserts that RDR2 performs a cultural hermeneutic, moving beyond the mythic structures catalogued by Northrop Frye to deconstruct the “terrible burden of the American past” identified by Leslie Fiedler. The narrative arc of the protagonist, Arthur Morgan, exemplifies a late-stage, self-aware collapse of the classic Hero/Persona archetype. His journey is framed by a persistent confrontation with the Shadow, the inherent violence and epistemological failure of the vanishing American landscape The game’s interactive paratextuality, enabled by its open-world design, grants the player agency over Morgan’s ethical trajectory, thus transforming the passive reception of myth into a dynamic, ethical negotiation. This mechanism achieves a novel form of digital storytelling, challenging the traditional linearity of the quest romance. RDR2 functions as an elegiac counter-narrative, using cutting-edge simulation to examine the moral and historical anxieties of American culture. The paper contends that this interactive, technologically mediated experience is not a mere perpetuation of the myth, but a critical, self-reflexive sublimation of the Frontier, offering a compelling case study for the intersection of classical literary theory and contemporary popular media.