The best thing in Geoff Klock's book is his understanding of Miller's project as an effort to collapse "a host of contradictory weak readings of a single, overdetermined character" into his own strong vision. I think that's right--not only that, it accurately describes Batman's own quest in the book. He wants to take the country back from "mutants" and Mary Hart and David Letterman and Dr. Ruth and namby-pamby liberals of all sorts (even those of the Kryptonian variety) and give it back to..."the people"? No way! Bruce wants to repackage the world in a form that he can understand...anyone that helps him to do that is a "good soldier", anyone who doesn't is...well...in trouble!

When all of this starts to work for him, in book three, he begins to be described as "a voice"--and he stops telling us in the first person what he's feeling... I had it wrong when I argued that Miller made a mistake in opening inside Bruce's death-drive--now I think it was a brilliant idea! There may not be a better work out there about the aspiration to--and qualified achievement of--sublimity, from the point of view of the aspirant! Even when he's narrating the story, Bruce is no ordinary first-person narrator, of the kind you meet in The Blithedale Romance, The Sacred Fount, The Great Gatsby, The Thin Man, or It's A Good Life If You Don't Weaken... He's not concerned with showing us the limits of his ability to make sense of the world (and he has no sense of humour--the first-person narrator is usually self-deprecating-not Bruce! although you could read Alfred as the little voice of humility in Batman's head...), he wants to bulldoze those limits, and confuse us into thinking they were never there...

The switch in narrative point of view thus becomes the most crucial element in understanding the book as a whole. The move from first-person to omniscient narrator and back again reminds me of Moby Dick--a work in which we begin with Ishmael, and end with him, but lose him completely when the novel rams into the sublime! Same thing here, except that we begin in Ahab's clutches, as it were!

Bruce's whale is, of course, Superman. But if Miller had wanted us to take this point of view ourselves, I don't believe he would have done what he did in the nuclear explosion scenes (177-179 in the TPB). Superman is the strongest man on earth, sure, but his strength does not come from the same place that Batman's does! His "resurrection" is achieved through a renewed sense of a relationship to the things of the earth--birds, bullfrogs,etc; it is not an act of will! In the final battle, Batman takes his best shot at putting his fist through the opaque wall of relationality that is the sublime... and, of course, he fails!

But it's foolish to assume that that kind of energy will ever use itself up, and that's where I think DKR may be even more interesting than Moby Dick... Most humans are not Buddhists, and the antagonistic relationship between Desire and World is not going away! Solipsism can sustain itself--can make a "good enough life" for itself...as long as it stays underground! The sublime is above persecution--like Superman, it winks at human striving, whenever it can afford to. Batman is back to being a lone nut with a dream (and a little army composed of "good soldiers") and he's back to tell us about it in the first person.