Light and Darkness in Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Marlow chooses a brighter path than his counterpart in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now , Captain Willard. The two share the task of searching for and discovering Kurtz, as well as caring for his memory, but their beliefs before meeting him place the characters at opposite ends of a theme. These opposite ends are light and dark, and represent good and evil. In the opening pages of Heart of Darkness, Marlow begins to tell the story of himself as nothing more than a sailor, who had a taste for adventure and saw navigating a river in a place as distant and mysterious as the Congo as chance of finding it. Captain Willard, however, had "prayed for a mission, and for [his] sins they gave [him] one" (AP). Marlow's nature at the beginning of this journey is that of a bored young man, trying to fill his time: a noble and socially acceptable existence. Captain Willard is beyond the bounds of normal society as he begins narrating Apocalypse Now from his hotel room in Saigon. He explains: "When I was here [at war] I wanted to be there [at home]. When I was there all I could think about was going back to the jungle" (AP). Willard is out of society but is slightly tied to his connection to the military. This connection is weak, due to the nature of war and the fact that the laws of normal society do not apply in war. Kurtz, however, took the final step by breaking away from the army; "he broke away from them, and then he broke away from himself. I had never seen a man so broken and torn to pieces" (AP). Willard doesn't even know if he will oppose Kurtz when he meets him, because he sees Kurtz in himself...... middle of paper......v099B/fa/n022/ae-apocalypse-fortmeyer.html created in 1994 (accessed 23 January 2000). Heart of Darkness. Directed by Nicolas Roeg. Turner Network Television (TNT) Pictures, 1994.Heart of Darkness: Theme/Symbol/Allusion/Foreshadow http://164.116.90.3/public/jarvinen/hod.html (accessed January 21, 2000).Nash, Jay Robert and Stanley Ralph Ross. "Apocalypse Now" The movie guide. Chicago: Cinebooks, 1985. Raskin, Jonah. The mythology of imperialism. New York: Random, 1971. Urch, Martin. Apocalypse Now: A Film Review by Martin Urch http://us.imdb.com/Reviews/30/3030 created in 1994 (accessed January 29, 2000). Virtanen, Panu S. Plot Summary of 'Apocalypse Now' http:// www.geocities.com/Hollywood/9067/plot.html (accessed January 16, 2000). Watts, Cedric. Conrad's Heart of Darkness: A Critical and Contextual Discussion. Milan: Mursia Internazionale, 1977.