Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now

Joseph Conrad once wrote, “the individual consciousness was destined to be in total contradiction to its physical and moral environment” (Watt 78); the validity of his statement is reflected in the physiological and psychological changes that the characters in both his Heart of Darkness and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now undergo as they travel up their respective rivers, the Congo and the Nung. Each journey up the tropical river is symbolic of “a voyage of discovery into …

…newly acquired knowledge. He has been changed, humbled by his confrontation with “the darkness inherent in Kurtz, in himself, in existence” (Hagen 294). All in all, both river journeys, each by itself literal and symbolic, physical and psychological, reflect “search[es] towards death and dissolution” (Wilmington 288) that lead into the “heart of darkness”. Each tropical river embodies the characters’ struggles with their conscience and consciousness, as well as their battles against the “fascination of abomination” (Conrad 78).