Gulistan state university department of the english language and literature

THE MINISTRY OF HIGHER AND SECONDARY SPECIAL
EDUCATION OF THE REPUBLIC OF UZBEKISTAN


GULISTAN STATE UNIVERSITY

DEPARTMENT OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

COURSE WORK

on theme:
“ Herman Melville: Moby Dick”


COMPLIED BY: AXMEDOVA ZARINA
SUPERVISOR: ISMANKULOVA NIGORA


GULISTAN - 2022
CONTENT
INTRODUCTION…………………………………………….3
I CHAPTER AN AMERICAN PROLIFIC NOVELIST HERMAN MELVILLE
1.1 Herman Melville’s biography  4
1.2 His General narrative style and creative activity 11
II CHAPTER THE WORK THAT INTRODUCED HERMAN MELVILLE TO THE WORLD: MOBY DICK
2.1 Briefly about the content of the work …………………………….18
2.2 About its structure, theme and style …………………………………………………………26


CONCLUSION…………………………………………………30
REFERENCES………………………………………………....31


INTRODUCTION


Herman Melville’s family seems to have given him some grounding in great events of early American history. His paternal grandfather participated in the Boston Tea Party; his maternal grandfather was a Revolutionary War hero. His parents also framed the material opportunities and dangers in American life. His mother Maria Gansevoort came from one of the richest families in Albany, New York. His father Allan Mellvill, however, had all of the appearance of prosperity with little of the substance. His Manhattan dry goods store went bankrupt; he left unpaid bills behind when he fled with his family to Albany. He apparently suffered a mental breakdown just before his death in 1832. The final “e” was added to the family name after his death.
The freedom (or lack thereof) of the will; fate and destiny; surface and depth: these are themes that Melville (the final“e” was added to the family name after his father’s death) encountered early in his own life. These are universal themes given a distinct twist, or bent, by the great American experiment in democracy and freedom, by opportunities in this land of apparently unmatched resources, and by the underlying—perhaps unconscious, perhaps evil, probably selfish and ambitious—motives tyrannizing over and driving individual actions.
Despite whatever might have been Melville’s own wishes at the time, he was taken out of school when he was twelve so that he could earn a living and help support his family. He worked as a bank clerk and as a teacher, in his brother’s fur-cap store in Albany and on his Uncle’s farm in Pittsfield. In 1839, he lit out not for the wilderness but for a different frontier: the ocean. He served as a cabin boy on a ship bound for Liverpool.


Now admired as a masterpiece of American literature and considered one of the greatest novels of all time, Moby-Dick was published to unfavorable reviews, and its author, Herman Melville, was subsequently unable to make a living as a writer. He wrote just three more novels after Moby-Dick and then retired from literary life, working as a customs officer, writing poems, a novella, and a few short stories. Not until the 1920s were the multi-layered qualities of his epic novel fully appreciated.
Ostensibly the story of a whaling voyage as seen through the eyes of Ishmael, the book's narrator, and the account of the pursuit of a white whale, the novel is concerned with many of the issues which dominated nineteenth-century thought in America. The relationship between the land and the sea echoes the conflict between adventure and domesticity, between frontiersman and citydweller. Captain Ahab's tragic monomania, as expressed in his obsessive pursuit of the whale, is an indirect commentary on the feelings of disillusionment in mid-nineteenth-century America and on the idea that the single-minded pursuit of an ideal is both vain and self-destructive.
Highly symbolic, tightly packed with philosophical musings, and interspersed with goading questions, the novel put off many of its early readers with what was seen as a rejection of basic storytelling principles. Each time some form of narrative tension is established, the author appears to launch off into obscure ramblings. They are only arcane, of course, when the reader does not perceive the hidden meanings within these passages; modern audiences have the advantage of being more receptive to disjointed narrative techniques. As for the novel's subtexts, only a few of these require sophisticated knowledge of nineteenthcentury thought; the majority concern the big and immutable questions of life.