Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now
Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse NowInherent inside every human soul is a savage evil side that
remains repressed by society. Often this evil side breaks out during
times of isolation from our culture, and whenever one culture
confronts another. History is loaded with examples of atrocities that
have occurred when one culture comes into contact with another.
Whenever fundamentally different cultures meet, there is often a fear
of contamination and loss of self that leads us to discover more about
our true selves, often causing perceived madness by those who have yet
to discover.
The Puritans left Europe in hopes of finding a new world to
welcome them and their beliefs. What they found was a vast new world,
loaded with Indian cultures new to them. This overwhelming cultural
interaction caused some Puritans to go mad and try to purge themselves
of a perceived evil. This came to be known as the Salem witch trials.
During World War II, Germany made an attempt to overrun Europe.
What happened when the Nazis came into power and persecuted the Jews
in Germany, Austria and Poland is well known as the Holocaust. Here,
human�s evil side provides one of the scariest occurrences of this
century. Adolf Hitler and his Nazi counterparts conducted raids of the
ghettos to locate and often exterminate any Jews they found. Although
Jews are the most widely known victims of the Holocaust, they were not
the only targets. When the war ended, 6 million Jews, Slavs, Gypsies,
homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Communists, and others targeted by
the Nazis, had died in the Holocaust. Most of these deaths occurred in
gas chambers and mass shootings. This gruesome attack was motivated
mainly by the fear of cultural intermixing which would impurify the
"Master Race."
Joseph Conrad�s book, The Heart of Darkness and Francis Coppola�s
movie, Apocalypse Now are both stories about Man�s journey into his
self, and the discoveries to be made there. They are also about Man
confronting his fears of failure, insanity, death, and cultural
contamination. During Marlow�s mission to find Kurtz, he is also
trying to find himself. He, like Kurtz had good intentions upon
entering the Congo. Conrad tries to show us that Marlow is what Kurtz
had been, and Kurtz is what Marlow could become. Every human has a
little of Marlow and Kurtz in them. Marlow says about himself, "I was
getting savage (Conrad)," meaning that he was becoming more like
Kurtz. Along the trip into the wilderness, they discover their true
selves through contact with savage natives.
As Marlow ventures further up the Congo, he feels like he is
traveling back through time. He sees the unsettled wilderness and can
feel the darkness of it�s solitude. Marlow comes across simpler
cannibalistic cultures along the banks. The deeper into the jungle he
goes, the more regressive the inhabitants seem.
Kurtz had...
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