A posting of an applicant’s response to the following prompt:
What values qualify you to join the Joker’s team? In what way do the Joker’s ideas relate to your own experience? Illustrate your beliefs with appropriate context or examples.
Growing
up in a working-class Gotham family is hard. My father worked. My
mother worked. They’re both gone now. I don’t know how I could have
coped with anything if it weren’t for Arkham. They teach me here.
Sometimes they have us read. Take Anton Chekhov, for instance. “A
Doctor’s Visit.” When I first read it, I thought that this Chekhov must
have come from Gotham just like me. I immediately felt like he
understood. It is very much the story of a young man who, like me, wants
to understand the perplexing situations that he finds himself in. He is
a doctor and I am just a young working man, but eventually we both
uncover the same horrible truth. Korolyov strives to understand the
cycle that smothers both the privileged and the powerless alike. You
know what I mean, of course, Mr. Joker.
It’s
all about the devil, as Korolyov says. It’s all about the factory and
its crimson eyes, which are a part of the system. Sitting on that heap
of wood, amongst all that raw material—the burden of us working
people—don’t you think someone else could have come to his same
conclusion? Christina Dmitryevna, with her pince-nez, is nothing, as
Korolyov realizes. All of this work is done to the detriment of the
working and the leisure classes alike. It is a cycle of death--dirty and
ugly and silent death. In the same way, Gotham is a city of
self-perpetuating filth. Its order is nothing, really, but a figurehead
sustained for its own vanity, just like Dmitryevna.
But
wait! Let me go back. I know that you will see my meaning, Mr. Joker,
if you look at the text of the story. It even begins with this distant
figure, “the Professor,” an upper-class educated sort of man,
disregarding a telegram from the Lyalikov’s factory. He sends his
assistant Korolyov to respond to the call, and the reader never hears
from him again. And the assistant can barely even stand to stay one
night at the factory; he is utterly repulsed by it. In short, Chekhov
begins with a separation of class, of the problems of one world from
another. That’s where it starts for me, too. Do you think Bruce Wayne
ever spares a thought about the problems of the likes of me? And yet we
toil in the streets. We built Gotham. The workpeople Korolyov meets on
the road built his world, but they are tired, even at his arrival, even
of that which is new. How does no one see? This is a story for all of
Gotham’s forgotten youth.
Maybe
that’s why the story relates to me so intimately. Maybe it is this
sense of tiredness, of exhaustion really, with the false and unfair
order of things, where we all work for faceless powers we don’t know,
idols of deceit who are never made any happier by the profits. Or maybe
it is Liza herself, who reminds me of that someone. I want to hate her,
but I can’t help but think that she is wishing for something that is
similar, fundamentally, to what I want for Gotham. She looks to the
outside for change. We need an upheaval, but it won’t come from the
complacent rich or the powerless poor beneath them. We need a catalyst
that will break down the demoniacal order.
Liza’s
mistake is that she hopes Korolyov will be the catalyst. His happiness
is of intuition, perhaps of understanding, but not of action. My mistake
will not be the same. You see, Mr. Joker, I am willing to gamble on
bigger things than Liza is. I am willing to join you in becoming the
change Gotham needs. Do you see the resemblance now? “A Doctor’s Visit”
to Gotham, I hope, is in order. Hand me the leech.
Application status: accepted
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