The ending chapter is actually a little confusing to me. Was the first part of it but a dream? Was Enkidu back, then died once again, and then came back again? What about the drumstick? What was it exactly? And why does this chapter end so sadly?
I cannot not answer all of these questions correctly or without being confused, but I can answer them in what I think the puzzling chapter is about.
The first part was not a dream, but nor was it reality. It was the past brought up again, but said and explained in a different way. The drumstick was the quest Enkidu and Gilgamesh had embarked on to kill Huwawa. And when Enkidu arrived at the gate to the Nether world, dressed in the opposite way of what Gilgamesh told him and the cry of the dead took him, was when the gods decided Enkidu must die so he did. And at the end, Gilgamesh is finally able to arise Enkidu back from the dead and Enkidu explains all that was happening in the underworld. The good people didn't have such a bad afterlife and the bad ones didn't make it so well.
And there was one line, "the Drum and Drumstick that I had have fallen down through a hole into the Nether World," that made me think of Alice in Wonderland. Only in the actual Alice in Wonderland, Alice is the one that falls in, not the drumstick. And what I realized was that Nether World sounds almost like "Another World" which sounds like it's referring to the world Alice arrives in. I just found that interesting how I automatically thought of the book Alice in Wonderland.
So it was a confusing end of a book. One that I still don't get but can make assumptions on.
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