“They wanted the company’s name to suggest a sense of adventure,” the corporate statement reads, “a connection to the Northwest and a link to the seafaring tradition of the early coffee traders.” An initial idea was “Pequod,” but it was rejected for sounding awkward, a bad fit for the product. Eventually the company’s founders settled on another reference from Herman Melville’s enormous and stubbornly well-known novel, the name of the Pequod’s first mate — “you guessed it, Starbuck.” With this, “a brand was born.” The brand became an iconic American brand, its name derived from the iconic American novel that Melville published in 1852. This dense, forbidding, magnificent novel — a kind of American scripture — reverberates and reverberates in American culture, perhaps especially in American popular culture. Starbuck is far from Moby-Dick’s most memorable character. He is outshone by dreamy melancholic Ishmael, the novel’s narrator and the sole survivor of the shipwreck that the Pequod becomes. The novel lives in Ishmael’s voice — from its first sentence, “Call me Ishmael” — though Ishmael slowly fades from its story, as Captain Ahab hijacks novel and journey alike, grandly charismatic, ambitiously evil, and the source of ceaseless speculation from so many generations of Moby-Dick readers. Perhaps Ahab was John Calhoun, the Southern politician who prodded the United States into the Civil War. Perhaps Ahab was Adolf Hitler before the fact, desperate to invade the entire world. Almost as much as the white whale, Ahab and his wooden leg dominate Moby-Dick. He quested after the whale; we quest after him. Ahab is mad, while Ishmael is along for the ride. Acting against Ahab, Starbuck is an unimpressive foil, or so it seems, and a marginal one at that. He registers Ahab’s lunacy and cannot deflect or contain it. Starbuck’s reemergence circa 1971 at the pinnacle of coffee capitalism is almost comic. In Moby-Dick, somber Starbuck does not suggest a sense of enterprise or adventure. He is from Martha’s Vineyard, not the Pacific Northwest, and as a seasoned hunter of whales, he is no purveyor of coffee. His name has been attached to the wrong company, which has popularized but also obscured the literary character of Starbuck, who, unlike Ahab, does not symbolize anything very obvious in Moby-Dick. It might be easy to dismiss Starbuck as a vehicle of virtue signaling, with all the anonymity and the blandness that virtue signaling connotes and with all the space that divides virtue signaling from virtue. Considered closely, however, Starbuck is neither bland nor empty. He should be more iconic, not as a salesman-adventurer but as a crucial piece of the puzzle that is Moby-Dick. Ahab embodies Moby-Dick’s fascination with tyranny, exploitation, and zealotry, at least for those who have never read the novel. Starbuck traces the dilemma of having to respond to Ahab: Ahab the call, Starbuck the response. That Starbuck fails to stop Ahab is important. That Starbuck lives in honesty and dignity is not less important. Starbuck parries an Ahab lawless and lost to the allure of death, countering a nihilism masquerading as a purpose. Starbuck’s weapon is his steady adherence to the law. Thou shalt not kill, Starbuck believes, and kill he shall not. Thou shalt not lie, he believes, and he tells the truth. The retort to evil, though unvictorious in his case, Starbuck is emblematic of a moral man and a moral citizen. Perhaps it is fortunate that (owing to a coffee franchise) his name is everywhere visible in the United States. 
Melville adored allegory, analogy, association, implication. In Mardi, the novel that precedes Moby-Dick in his oeuvre, Melville projected his feelings about politics and philosophy, civilization and travel, commerce and technology onto a phantasmagoric literary landscape, allegory embedded in allegory, symbol embedded in symbol — not unlike the Divine Comedy, in which Dante’s Florence is refracted through the poet’s symbolic invention. Moby-Dick is much more of a story, a story of the sea, a yarn, but at every turn it invites analogy. The Pequod is surely America, as the founders of Starbucks sensed, a rude democracy, an industrial factory, a capitalist juggernaut (as the founders of Starbucks did not sense). The white whale is an all-purpose analogy. It is the uncapturable impulse behind the quest: nature, divinity, victim, victimizer, mystery, malice, eternity, death. The interpretive possibilities are intentionally endless, just as the analogies are omnipresent. Ishmael has precise associations in Moby-Dick and a specific analogy behind him. Enamored of satire, Melville goes after Ralph Waldo Emerson through Ishmael, or he goes after his personal image of Emerson. Ishmael represents the motif of contemplation-in-nature, of an aristocratic life lived apart from “society,” doing so on a whaleship ferociously dedicated to money making, near the terrifying untamable ocean and under the thumb of an obsessed inhumane captain. Time and again, Ishmael is confronted not with Emerson’s restorative nature, not with New England in autumn, but with “the universal cannibalism of the sea.” The sea’s creatures, including humans, are designed to devour one another, and that darkness is nature. Naive Ishmael is the philosopher with too much unreliable philosophy in him and too little spiritual mettle to be anything other than the ship’s chronicler, a job he does to perfection. Melville has fun with Ishmael’s gauzy, adolescent adventurism. Ahab is prodigious in his capacity to engender analogies. Interestingly, Ahab does not emerge organically from American politics as Melville knew it in the 1840s or before. George Washington is the anti-Ahab, the calm general who turned down absolute power, who did not burn with mystical self-destroying fire but who retired quietly to Mount Vernon, having safely completed his completable mission. There is nothing of Ahab in Thomas Jefferson. Closer to Melville’s time, Andrew Jackson may be bound up in the figure of Ahab, Jackson having had a touch of the demagogue in him, but Jackson did not sink the ship; in some ways he democratized and righted the ship. The robber barons of the late nineteenth century were not an American phenomenon
Citizen Starbuck, or Democracy and The Whale
