Choose 2 questions below and provide an 800-word response.
1- What is the difference between justice and vengeance according to the film? What is your definition of vengeance and justice -- are they the same or different?
2- Ra's Al Ghoul, Batman, and Thomas Wayne (Bruce's father) all have varying answers to the problem of injustice in the world. Is any of them right? Which of these do you identify with most?
3- Why is Batman so bent on saving Gotham? Yes, his parents were shot -- but that doesn't mean he has to save Gotham. What does Bruce get out of saving Gotham?
4- Does Bruce have the right to become a vigilante and take the law into his own hands? Could he have done something else other than become the Batman? How would you react to someone taking the law into his/her own hands?
5- Bruce states that "people need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy." Can this statement apply to our very own society today?
6- In "How to Tell a True War Story," Tim O'Brien writes:
Proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil--everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self--your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though it's odd, you're never more alive than when you're almost dead. You recognize what's valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what's best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.
How might this passage from The Things They Carried provide insight into understanding why Bruce Wayne chose to become the Batman?