Does the debtor thing change over the game? I remember that incident early on being what gets him really thinking about who he is. It's a lot more personal than robbing banks and running cons, and it seems to be his shooting the albatross moment.

I think his antagonism towards mueller helps highlight Arthur's hypocrisy in trying to think of himself as some kind of principled robber. Mueller robs people ruthlessly with less blood spilled, while Arthur shoots people left and right, while trying to consider himself noble or at least better.

Like, I think that's a theme - they're all crooks with various levels of pretension about it. Josiah and that card sharp are gentlemen thieves running clever cons. Arthur's a simple thug. John's kind of a dumbass brought up in the life. His wife is ujst kind of stuck with it all for lack of alternatives. The younger women have the freedom of a mostly egalitarian comrades at the cost of the violence and uncertainty of their lifestyle. Lenny and Charles get a place where they're respected and valued they wouldn't find in white society. Micah's a stone psychopath who show's all their pretension's of better or worse thieves and killers to be empty. And Dutch is the what no theory does to a motherfuckers ideologe who brings all these lost souls together but whose hubris and lack of grounding drives them towards destruction.

They're a mish-mash of all kinds of people alienated from mainline society for many different reasonns whose membership in the gang grants them a very precarious and temporary freedom from the violence of the world, at the cost of being predators who feed on the vulnerable people of that world despite whatever pretensions they might have about what they do.

There's definitely something there about the cost of freedom being a life of war. You can be free from society, but that inevitably puts you outside of society as a criminal and an outlaw, and severely limits how you can earn your daily bread. You can be free and wild, but you're gonna die young and die hard. And most people don't choose that life, but are stuck there by circumstance and the violence of society. And then the "closing of the west" brings the violence and control of the state to the liminal space between the alleged wilderness and the alleged civilization, sort of reflecting how the cops have encroached in to every single moment of our lives.