The story of the disappearance of flight MH370, falling from the sky into the sea, is the opposite of the one that held the world's attention in 2010: the survival and reappearance, from the depths of the earth, of the trapped Chilean miners. While it has been established beyond doubt that the plane crashed into the ocean, with no survivors, the families of the dead understandably refuse to accept this conclusion. In the aftermath of a natural disaster, people are pulled from the wreckage of a collapsed building after the search and rescue efforts have given way to the grim duty of recovery. The loss a vessel with all hands, a mass death from which no one escapes, is not inconceivable, but the idea of such a thing being incommunicable is so dreadful that we cling to the hope of a survivor long after it is plausible. Hence the power and reassurance of the lines from Job quoted by Herman Melville in the epilogue to Moby-Dick. "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee." The black box embodies this idea of the survivor's story and testimony even in a situation where the loss of life has been total. Face to face with his fate, one of the last things Robert Redford's unnamed sailor does in the film All Is Lost is to write a brief message, put it in a bottle and throw it overboard. All may be lost – but the hope is that this hand-scrawled version of the black box, will be found. If it is not … We have seen in the last few weeks the speed with which theories and conspiracies whoosh into the information vacuum. In the absence of reliable facts we are left with the lines repeated hypnotically by Conrad at the end of The Secret Agent: "An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang forever over this act of madness or despair." In a post-post-religious age the inexplicable has retreated, like some endangered animal, to the wild and dangerous places of the imagination. The flipside of this is an increasing hunger for such sightings, a thirst for stories of inexplicable survival.

An extreme example occurred shortly before MH370 went missing, when the Mexican fisherman José Salvador Alvarenga was found after drifting at sea for 13 months. Amazement that he had survived for so long on a diet of raw turtles and rain water soon turned to suspicion. This is hardly surprising given a history of fictional tales passing themselves off as fact – or of fact being turned into fiction – so lengthy that it reaches back to the dawn of the English novel. The real-life castaway Alexander Selkirk was the basis for Robinson Crusoe, whose adventures, the first edition claimed, were "written by himself", not by Daniel Defoe. Meticulously itemised by William Golding in the novel Pincher Martin, the survival of the eponymous hero on a bare rock in the ocean is revealed, in the last lines, to have been not only a fiction – we knew that from the outset – but a parable. Even the fiction turns out to have been a fiction. Paradoxically, the more strictly stories of survival are stripped to their practical essentials the more readily they accumulate larger resonances. In his struggle to stay afloat Redford is like Sisyphus who, Camus insisted, we must imagine "happy". At one point, as one bit of ill-fortune is followed by another, Redford seems about to scream "Fuck". It never becomes a word, just a long howl of anguish: "Fffwwuuuh…" Apart from this moment, he is in his element. This is what he came to sea for. And it would be wrong, as we hear those fateful words, "All is lost", to take this as an admission of regret. It would be just as accurate to say that he has achieved his destination.

Compared with All Is Lost, Cast Away with Tom Hanks is a lavishly stranded epic. The aircraft in which Hanks and his colleagues are flying crashes into the sea, forced far from its presumed course by a storm. The search is called off, there are no survivors. But Hanks has survived, washed up on an island where he lives for four emaciated and bearded years on crabs, coconut milk and rain water. Various items from the plane float to the shore and prove useful – a pair of ice-skates is essential for sorting out his dental problems. But the best discovery, perhaps because it has no use value, is a Wilson volleyball. Hanks paints eyes and a mouth on it. Over the years, as it decays, it sprouts a tuft of hair and there develops, between man and ball, one of the great relationships in the history of cinema. In one scene, Hanks throws the ball away; afterwards there's a lovely post-row make-up with him on charming best behaviour – "I know you, I know you!" – as Wilson's usual silence acquires an impossible suggestion of hurt and sulk. This, of course, is not a relationship between equals. Wilson is not just Hanks's companion: he is also an altar and a god. A god created by the castaway's need. Eventually, after the two of them have left the island on a cobbled-together raft, Wilson is washed away. Hanks swims after him, reaches out his hand only to watch him drift from sight on what may or may not be Matthew Arnold's "sea of faith". Hanks, at that point, is so physically and psychically shattered as to be beyond hope and faith.

For most of All Is Lost the focus is so tight as to avoid the undertow of symbolic, religious or allegorical meaning – and is, as a result, unusually vulnerable to them. (Hamlet didn't call it a sea of troubles for nothing.) Redford is constantly trying to mend his boat. Unable to repair it he concentrates on slowing the rate of its deterioration. Even when he has only the brightness of his teeth to see by he's still trying something. That howl – "Fffwwuuuh …" – is the nearest he comes to prayer, after which he resumes the doomed chores of patching, pumping, fixing, plotting.

Shortly after seeing All Is Lost I saw the film adaptation of the stage play Charlie Victor Romeo. Set in the cramped confines of the flight decks of aircraft as various real-life emergencies unfold, the dialogue – both between the crew and between crew and air traffic control – is derived entirely from transcripts from cockpit voice recorders. Some of the incidents end with the plane landing safely, others with the deaths of everyone onboard. During a Q&A after the screening a member of the audience expressed surprise that there were no prayers, no mention of religion or god. The reason, it was explained, is that there's no time. In emergencies, as we have heard repeatedly in the last few weeks, pilots abide by the priorities of the abbreviation ANC: Aviate, Navigate, Communicate. According to Tom Wolfe, test pilots such as Chuck Yeager who possess "the right stuff" are distinguished by the ability to think quickly and logically in suddenly catastrophic situations: "I've tried A – I've tried B – I've tried C." The Chilean miners did a lot of praying, partly because they had so much time on their hands.

Which brings us back to where we began, to the hopes and prayers of families who had loved ones aboard MH370 and – spoiler alert – to the end of All Is Lost. Is the hand following a beam of light through the ocean and reaching down, Michelangelo-like, to the drowning Redford, an implausible cop-out or a religious salvation? Since these are, in a way, synonyms, it is both.

It is also strangely reminiscent of DH Lawrence's great long poem "The Ship of Death". Few people can have lived their lives with such a consciousness of death as Lawrence – though this often manifested itself as a wilful refusal to attribute his ill-health to the tuberculosis that would kill him. Even when he was forced to go to a sanatorium, the aptly-named Ad Astra, Lawrence grumbled, in one of his last letters, "this place no good". It's as though, having exhausted all other options, he could at least express chronic dissatisfaction with this world. But in the posthumously published poem he confronted his death directly, through the image of a boat sailing slowly into deeper and deeper darkness until it is completely enveloped by it:

And everything is gone, the body is gone
completely under, gone,
entirely gone.
The upper darkness is heavy as the lower,
between them the little ship
is gone
she is gone.
It is the end, it is oblivion.

Few pieces of writing bring the reader this close to the incommunicable experience of death, of nonexistence. The end is as uncompromising and absolute as the verdict that flight MH370 went into the water, that there are no survivors. But the poem is not at an end. It continues:

And yet out of eternity a thread
separates itself on the blackness,
a horizontal thread
that fumes a little with pallor upon the dark.
Is it illusion? or does the pallor fume
A little higher?
Ah wait, wait, for there's the dawn,
the cruel dawn of coming back to life
out of oblivion.

• Geoff Dyer's new book, Another Great Day at Sea, about life aboard an American aircraft carrier, will be published in May.