I somewhat struggled to make this part fit with Queequeg’s not being a Christian. “Does Melville mean a Christian wouldn’t ask for a coffin while he’s still alive?” I asked my grandmother.

“The ones I know wouldn’t,” Nana answered me. “That’s more in keeping with what a cannibal would request, I think.”

Nana and I were a long way into Moby-Dick when we got to the moment when Captain Ahab comes on deck and makes whimsical remarks (mostly to himself) about the suitability of putting a coffin to use as a life buoy.

Dedicated lit student that she was, my grandmother often interrupted herself when she was reading aloud to me; she wanted to be sure I had noticed certain things. In the chapter where Ahab is musing to himself on the meaning of a coffin as a life buoy, Nana stopped reading to me and remarked: “I hope you noticed, Adam, that this is the same ship’s carpenter who made Ahab’s prosthetic leg.”

“I noticed, Nana,” I assured her.

Moby-Dick is a story about a seemingly unkillable whale. It’s also a story about absolute authority—a man who won’t listen to anyone. The captain of the Pequod, Ahab, is obsessed with killing Moby Dick. The white whale is responsible for Ahab’s losing a leg. Nana and I knew that Ahab should just get over it. Ahab refuses to assist the captain and crew of the Rachel, another whaling ship. The Rachel has encountered Moby Dick; the Rachel has lost a whaleboat with all its crew. Won’t Ahab help the Rachel search for its missing sailors? The son of the Rachel’s captain is among them. No, Ahab won’t help. Ahab only wants to find and kill Moby Dick.

We know what’s going to happen. Ahab finds what he’s looking for—the white whale kills him and sinks the Pequod. But wait a minute. There’s a first-person narrator. Ishmael is the storyteller. What can possibly save Ishmael? Did you forget that Queequeg’s coffin floats? It’s a good thing not everyone onboard was a Christian. Let this be a lesson to you: never take an ocean voyage without a tattooed cannibal.

“Do you see, dear?” Nana interrupted her reading to ask me. “It is Ahab’s refusal to help his fellow men at sea that dooms him—and all hands, but one, aboard the Pequod.”

“I see,” I said. How could I miss it? It took three years.

The white whale sinks the Pequod. Everyone, except Ishmael, drowns—“and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago,” as Melville puts it. That’s pretty clear.