The Musket

The scene is brief. Chapter 123. The gale has passed, a fair wind has come, and Starbuck descends to report it to Ahab. He stops before the cabin door. He sees the muskets.

"He would have shot me once."

Ahab had threatened him before — in the quarter-deck's bright theater of vengeance, when Starbuck said "I will not hunt the whale" and Ahab leveled a loaded musket at his chest. The threat landed. Starbuck retreated. Now he is standing outside the door with the loaded gun in his hands, Ahab asleep inside, the hammock swinging within a few feet of the panel.

He holds the muzzle against the wood. "On this level, Ahab's hammock swings within; his head this way."

Melville writes: "The musket shook like a drunkard's arm against the panel; Starbuck seemed wrestling with an angel."

The angel doesn't lose. Starbuck replaces the musket and reports the wind.

The obvious reading is that Starbuck fails here — that his virtue curdles into paralysis, that the moment passes and thirty men die because he couldn't do what needed doing. That reading is not wrong. But it's incomplete. Because it treats the musket as a choice Starbuck made, when the deeper truth is that the musket was never really an option for him.

Starbuck tells himself: "I can't withstand thee, then, old man."

Not won't. Can't.

The distinction is not splitting hairs. "I won't" implies a force being marshaled and then surrendered — a will that chooses the worse thing. "I can't" implies something more structural: the action simply doesn't exist inside the space of things Starbuck can do. Mutiny exists in the world. Murder exists in the world. But neither exists in the space of what Starbuck is. His virtue — his "condensation," as Melville calls it early in the book, his thirty arid summers, his twice-baked self — has no door that opens onto shooting a sleeping captain.

This is not cowardice. Cowardice would be wanting to act and failing. Starbuck is wrestling with the angel, the gun shaking against the panel. He is trying to cross the line. He cannot. The angel holds.

Ahab knows this about him.

In "The Symphony" — the calm before the last day — Ahab chooses Starbuck as his confessor. He weeps genuinely. He names his own ruin: forty years of privation, a wife he widowed at the altar, a son he will not watch grow up. "What a forty years' fool — fool — old fool, has old Ahab been!" He sees, with full clarity, what the pursuit has cost and what it will cost. And he confesses it to Starbuck, specifically.

Why Starbuck?

Because Starbuck is the only man on the ship who can receive that confession and not use it against him. He's the only man who will hear "I know I'm ruining us all" and respond not with mutiny but with grief. Starbuck says: "Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home!"

He begs. He does not act. And Ahab knows he won't act. The confession is safe in Starbuck's hands precisely because Starbuck's virtue is a seal. The man who would tell the truth to Ahab's face — "vengeance on a dumb brute, madness!" — is also the man who will never, finally, do anything about it. Ahab reads him perfectly. He chooses Starbuck for the very quality that makes Starbuck harmless to him.

The virtue and the paralysis are the same fact.

There is one other scene that belongs here.

Right after the musket chapter, Pip appears. Pip, who was lost overboard and pulled out of the sea, had in that interval "visited the inscrutable foundations of the ocean." He came back diminished in some ways and vast in others — dissociated, wandering the ship, speaking in fragments. "He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad." Ahab meets Pip and says something strange: "Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings."

He is gentler with Pip than with anyone else in the novel. He takes his hand. He calls him his ship's treasure. And then he warns Pip away: "Do thou abide below here, where they shall serve thee, as if thou wert the captain. Aye, lad, thou shalt sit here in my own screwed chair; another screw to it, thou must be."

And then: "for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health."

He names it — his obsession is a malady, and he needs to be sick. And he sends Pip away. He refuses the one medicine that could actually reach him. Starbuck's sanity, from outside, had no purchase on Ahab. But Pip's specific form of vastness — the boy who had seen the absolute and come back changed — that did touch something. The cords woven of heart-strings are real. Ahab weeps over Pip the way he weeps in "The Symphony."

And then he lets him go. He cannot be stopped from outside by Starbuck's virtue. He will not be reached from inside by Pip's vastness. Both refusals are complete. Both are Ahab.

The question that remains: is Starbuck a failure?

The book doesn't quite say so. Melville gives Starbuck one of the most precisely observed characterizations in all of fiction, and he gives him the dignity of being taken seriously as Ahab's only real interlocutor. The other mates — Flask, Stubb — are portraits, almost comic. Starbuck alone has the full weight of a moral universe behind him. He says "madness" to Ahab's face in a scene that takes real courage. He reads the doubloon and hears truth and walks away before the truth can complete its sentence, not from cowardice but from self-knowledge: "I will quit it, lest Truth shake me falsely."

That line is worth sitting with. He retreats from the doubloon not because the truth is wrong but because he knows he can't afford to be moved by it. If the truth lands fully, he'll have to act. And acting means confronting Ahab in a way he's constitutionally unable to do. So he enforces the limit early. He is intelligent about his own incapacity.

None of this saves the ship. But it keeps Starbuck whole, up to the end. The third day, before the boats lower, Ahab and Starbuck shake hands. "Some ships sail from their ports, and ever afterwards are missing, Starbuck." Their hands meet. "Starbuck's tears the glue."

He is weeping. He is going out in the boats anyway. He will be there on the final day because he is a first mate of the Pequod and that is what first mates do. His virtue won't let him commit murder. It also won't let him desert. The same condensed, twice-baked self that kept him from firing the musket puts him in the boat on the last day.

Both things are true. The musket wasn't fired. He was there at the end.

The angel doesn't lose. That's the point. Wrestling with an angel is not nothing — it means the angel was real, the contest was real, the outcome was not obvious. Starbuck tried to cross the line. The gun shook. He couldn't.

You can call that failure. You can also call it the shape of what it means to be Starbuck: a character so thoroughly formed by a set of values that those values define the boundary of possible action. His virtue is not incidental to who he is. It is who he is. And who he is cannot fire that gun.

Ahab understood this about him before Starbuck understood it about himself. That's the seal. That's the tragedy.