Walter Starbuck

Starbuck is the novel's central character, and its narrator. He is a white male American, in his eighties at the time the novel takes place, born to a pair of Polish immigrants who changed their name from Stankiewicz during an early phase of their lives in America, and who worked as house servants for a reclusive industrialist, Alexander Hamilton McCone (see below). The novel narrates how Starbuck grows up as McCone's protégé, living his life as a young adult according to his (McCone's) very strict, and arbitrary, rules. He begins the process of breaking those rules when he meets and falls in love with Mary Kathleen O'Looney (see below), also the child of immigrants (hers were Irish) but who, unlike Starbuck, grew up in a household where the rights of the worker, as opposed to the control of the owner, were the highest priority. Under Mary...