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Why did the story of Ishmael end at the last page of Moby Dick?

Because that's when the story ended.

A story is a slice of a continued and continuous world; the
world exists before, and continues after. The story never ends; you
just pull out pieces of it long enough to tell to other humans, who are
finite and cannot wait for infinity to unravel itself and tell us what
everything meant. Certainly, amazing things would continue to happen in
the B5 universe. But our telling of this piece of the story, is
finite.

We are finite. Zathras is finite.

The story is eternal.

jms