Peter Benchley ends his novel with a ghostly image. Brody stares through "the stinging salt water" as the dead shark sinks "in a slow and graceful spiral, trailing behind it the body of Quint." The fish literally disappears in the gloomy depths whilst Quint's body becomes "a shadow twirling slowly in the twilight." This image of the fisherman being transformed into an insubstantial spirit recalls the phrase about "the dead man's ghost encountering the first unknown phantom in the other world" from Chapter Forty Eight of Moby Dick, and it might have been a good one to end the novel on. However, Benchley, ever the pragmatist, resists a mystical conclusion, and returns to the living with his final paragraph:
"Brody watched until his lungs ached for air. He raised his head, cleared his eyes, and sighted in the distance the black point of the water tower. Then he began to kick toward shore."
The novel's final sentence points us in the direction of land, and the very last word -"shore"- itself marks the place where land and sea meet. The film ends with the very image of that final word, and, if you look closely between the scrolling credits, you can see two figures emerging from the waves onto the beach.
