I forget the boy’s name too but it was quite moving.
Ishmael had a deep and natural empathy for the various people he encountered, even the obnoxious ones. That was an essential part of Moby Dick, more important in its way than revenge.
The drowning of the cabin boy was foreshadowed by the earlier scenario where Queequeg saves the insulting hayseed country boy from Vermont and quietly goes back to smoking his pipe.
Melville truly was a Fellini type artist, as Bartleby and Billy Budd show.
Billy Budd? another fine novel
Someone even did an opera of Billy Budd, I heard it on my local university's classical station. It wasn't pleasant at all...