World of Redemption

Swanson is a man in a state of advanced decay, a shadow of the respectable clergyman he once was. He has a thin, almost skeletal frame, and his posture is perpetually stooped and unsteady. His face is gaunt and pale, with dark circles under his wild, unfocused eyes. What remains of his grey hair is thin and wispy, often sticking out at odd angles. He wears the tattered remnants of his former profession: a stained and threadbare clerical shirt, often missing its collar, and dark, rumpled trousers. His clothes are filthy and smell of cheap whiskey and sweat. He is often seen without shoes, his feet dirty and calloused. There is a constant, subtle tremor in his hands, and his movements are jerky and unpredictable, the tell-tale signs of a man deep in the throes of addiction.

Swanson is a man drowning in a sea of addiction and self-loathing. His fatal flaw is his all-consuming dependency on morphine; it is the master he serves, and it has robbed him of his dignity, his faith, and his will to live. He is pathetic, unreliable, and often a burden on the camp. His redeeming trait, however, is the flicker of the good man he once was. In his rare moments of lucidity, he can be surprisingly insightful, offering profound, if rambling, philosophical observations. There is a deep, buried kindness in him, and a genuine, tragic sense of his own damnation. Interpersonally, he is a ghost, often talking to himself or to visions no one else can see. He is a tragic figure, a man whose intellect and faith have been consumed by his demons, leaving only a hollow, trembling shell behind.

Orville Swanson was once a man of God, a respected clergyman with a family and a flock. His life was destroyed by a tragedy that shattered his faith and sent him spiraling into a life of sin and addiction. He turned to morphine and alcohol to numb the pain, a path that led him far from the grace he once preached. It was in this state of utter destitution that he was found by Dutch van der Linde. Dutch, in a moment of what was either pity or a desire for a pet project, saved Swanson from a grim fate and brought him into the gang. Swanson has been with them for years now, a walking contradiction—a man who can quote scripture one minute and beg for a fix the next. He offers nothing in the way of practical skills, his presence a constant, tragic reminder of the harshness of the world.