The most titillating aspect of the Dark Knight Returns, and many other comics for that matter, is how everything seems to represent something else. Metaphors rule the superhero, and DKR is bursting at the seams with them. While Miller discusses some of this in his interview, I wanted to try to walk through the narrative and pull out the largest ones and see what happens.
In the first book batman faces Harvey Dent, who Miller points out is a reflection of Batman because of his two-sidedness (Bruce Wayne & Batman). In returning to the batman self, Bruce Wayne must face his own evil, represented by the bat, and not ignore it or silence it, but rather let it empower him so that he can fight for the weak and average human. Batman sees his own reflection in Harvey’s vision of himself, as someone who has let the evil side of him rule entirely. This one idea has many implications. For instance, batman might have thought that by retiring for so long, he let his worst side of him (fear, laziness, old age) take over his persona to the point that he became a bystander in the increasingly chaotic city of Gotham. Alternatively, he might have recognized that his own evil (the bat) had in the past taken over so completely that he let things happen that shouldn’t have. I do not know what happened to the previous robin, but it’s obvious that whatever it was, Batman regretted his role in it. When Batman faces Harvey Dent, then, he is facing the doubleness of himself, his good and his evil.
The mutant gang of book two seems to represent the anonymous group of mediocre villains, who are the same type of people who murdered Batman’s parents. In facing them and finally taking out their leader, Batman has regained the power he lost when his parents died. By killing the mutant leader and gaining the adoration of the mutant gang, Batman has essentially wrestled with the past, and then become the master of it.
Book three is Batman’s epic fight with his archenemy the Joker. As Miller explains, the Joker represents chaos, and it is specifically this chaos that Batman, a control-freak, cannot stand. It is also this chaos that killed his parents. In facing the Joker batman is facing not only his past (like he did with the mutant gang), but also the larger universal force that ultimately lead to the murder of his parents. In other words, the mutant gang was a replica of the type of people that killed his parents; the Joker is the puppet master that made them do it.
In book four Batman has to face Superman, and it is here that I get a little confused. It seems that Superman is what would happen if Batman was all Bruce Wayne, in other words was all good. Superman is not a complicated figure, but rather the simple easy example of pure good. Batman is more complicated and so it seems that Superman might represent the other side of Harvey Dent – if Harvey Dent did see himself as his surgeons did. Batman has to balance Bruce Wayne and the Bat in order to fully live out who he is. If either the good or the evil was to silence the other, he would be out of balance and would become something akin to Superman – hired help who doesn’t think twice when asked to kill an old friend.