With great knowledge comes great responsibility

The concluding chapter of the novel is rather short. In it the narrator decides to make a plan to get Ishmael to a better place. He withdraws his savings and produces a very weak plan, with many flaws. He arrives to the place on a rented van and with the hope of giving back something in appreciation for all that Ishmael had taught him. But what he finds is a very disappointing sight; he realized that it was all gone. But he does find a trace of his friend. His old bribe turned up and saw him collecting all the garbage the gorilla had left behind, and with him came bad news. “It was the pneumonia that got him- your friend the ape.”(p.260). This news shocked the pupil and dug into his head at once. He realized he had let his mentor behind on the cold night, which had killed him. He wondered what he could do and figured out it wasn’t much, so he decided to drive home.
But this can’t be the end of so much dedication and thought. All this knowledge Ishmael had left behind was a huge treasure which the narrator had to share with the world. In his hands he had the ability to make a change. It was his obligation to transmit the message, an obligation he accepted since the begging of the teachings. But now that he was all alone with this knowledge, and no one was going to guide him, what would he do to save mankind? He had always assumed his mentor would be there to tell him what to do, but now he wasn’t, and the pupil was lost. “With gorilla gone, will there be hope for man?”(p.263). This quote ends the novel by leaving us in great suspense about future. In a superficial way, we still wonder if the pupil was able to transmit his knowledge. But once you think about it, the book is the way of transmitting these ideas, and he successfully enlightened our minds with this story. Now we ourselves are in the place the pupil was put into when his mentor died. We have the knowledge in our hands now, but do we have the courage and determination to share it with others for the well-being of all? Will we succumb to an eternal wait for someone to hold our hand and tell us exactly what to do with this knowledge? And Ishmael gave a very true example about our civilization comparing it with an airman in free fall: “That craft is doomed- and so is he unless he abandons it”(p.107). We are all on our aircraft thinking we are on a great flight, but we are really in a free fall going straight to disaster. And if we don’t make decisions and change the way we live, abandoning that doomed aircraft, we will soon be faced with our end, the very same thing we have always thought impossible. So it is up to us now to start changing the way we live, to accept that we make part of the law which the entire world follows, and to save ourselves and our world. Now it’s all in our hands as we have wanted it. With great knowledge comes great responsibility.