Heart of Darkness

One of the many similarities between Heart of Darkness and "Apocalypse Now" is race. Joseph Conrad and Francis Coppola both use white men as the characters that have dominance (Bradley). The white men not only dominate their respective crews, but also the peoples native to the country the white men are visiting. The character Conrad uses, Marlow, and Coppola uses his character, Willard, both look at the natives as though white men are the civilized culture and the native people are the savage culture (Franklin). Both works also reflect the theory that "civilized" white men that go into an uncivilized land become savage and do not return to white civilization. An example of this that is in the book is Marlow's appointment with the doctor. The doctor measures Marlow's skull to compare its size at the present time to the size of his skull upon his return from the Congo. The thought is that a civilized mans skull is a different size than a savage's skull. When Marlow asks the doctor how what the results of this test have been in the past, the doctor comments that there are none because no civilized person has ever returned from the Congo. An example of this in the movie is when Willard faces his own personality of whether or not to complete his soldierly mission of killing Kurtz or to abort it. If he completes the mission he is still civil, if he does not, the Vietnam jungle has conquered him. The first soldier that is sent to kill Kurtz did not kill Kurtz, but in fact became one of his followers. The jungle overcame the first soldier. An important similarity of the main characters in each work is that each character has a sympathy for Kurtz and when Kurtz dies, Marlow and Willard see a little of themselves in this degenerated savage white man (Harris). Perhaps the similarity of the book and movie is that we, the reader and viewer are intended to discover the darkness in our own hearts.

Although there was much similarity between the two works, there are many discrepancies that make Heart of Darkness and "Apocalypse Now" dissimilar. The settings of the stories were different and written in different time periods. Heart of Darkness, written in the late nineteenth century, was set in a wild African jungle frontier. "Apocalypse Now", released in 1979, was set in a war torn and hostile Vietnam. This could have been Coppola's opinion of a wrong political action and the brutality and senselessness