Joe doesn’t face the consequences of his acts all the way through the play. He overlooks the fact that he is responsible for those deaths and lets the judge decide who was guilty for the crime. The one who in the end was blamed for it was Steve, Annie’s father that in reality received the order from Joe. Joe tries ignoring the fact that he was the one who allowed those parts to be shipped and that he was the one to be blamed for the death of those pilots. There are many quotes throughout the play which reinforces what it was said above like: “I ignore what I gotta ignore” (page 14). Joe is revealed in the end of the play to be an immoral character, a liar and above all a coward.
Chris Keller is the one who learns the most valuable lesson about responsibility. Since he saw his father commit a number of very irresponsible acts, Chris learnt even though in a bad way, the meaning of responsibility. Chris always saw Joe as his father and not once as a man; this caused a huge impact in the end of the play, which caused Chris to get revolted with his father and wanting to take him to the police station. Chris saw his father as an example of human being. This image then gets corrupted when he finds out that his father is a coward and a liar. Chris doesn’t care too much regarding to the business. He thinks that there are many more important things above the business to think about. Chris tends to live looking towards the future in the beginning of the play but after what happened with his father he goes back into war time. He acts very affected towards the discovery of his father secret which maybe caused Joe to suicide. Using Ann as a shield Chris emphasizes the fact that Larry is dead so that he can have a free passage to remain with Ann without Kate making it harder.
Kate Keller knew since from the beginning that Joe, her husband, allowed those cylinder heads to be shipped even though they were faulty. This makes her also guilty for the death of those twenty one pilots. The author criticizes the fact that Kate lives a tough life since the death of her son Larry, but she did not think how the family of the pilots on those P-40’s would feel after there plane crashed. Kate doesn’t believe that Larry is dead because accepting his death would mean to believe that his death was a punishment of Joe’s crime. This argument is supported by this quotation: “your brother's alive, darling, because if he's dead, your father killed him. Do you understand me now? As long as you live, that boy is alive. God does not let a son be killed by his father” page 66.
I think that the entire moral of the story is related to the title “once and for all you can know there’s a universe of people outside and you’re responsible to it”. Since the beginning from the story it can be realized that every action taken by any character had a bigger consequence in the end of the play. It all joined up to build a big web of irresponsible and immature acts from all parts. Joe can’t be blamed for everything, because Kate could have stopped him, Steve could have taken control and aborted the shipping of the faulty cylinder heads and Chris could have given more attention to the business and could have avoided this episode.
