Heart Of Darkness Versus Apocalypse Now

Books and movies present stories in different ways because the medias are incredibly different. In the story Heart of Darkness, the author takes the motif of the journey and presents it in the third person in a way that people could understand with the topic of the spread of culture in the "third world." Apocalypse Now shows the journey in a completely different way. It is made into a first person narrative and is changed from colonization to the modern day equivalent of the Vietnam War. Both ways of showing the story keeps the main idea of the journey both inside and outside, but the way of presenting it is very different.

The story Heart of Darkness is presented to us in the third person. From the beginning, the story is shown as someone telling a story about something that's already happened and it goes back and forth between the "present" and several times which make up the past. The story starts with the narrator telling his fellow boat-mates about a man named Marlow and his adventure into the wild to find a man Kurtz. The whole time the story goes back and forth between the narrator and his telling the story and Marlow driving the action. This is an interesting way of narrating the story because we really do not hear much from the actual speaker but most of the action takes place through Marlow. In the movie Apocalypse Now, the entire story is presented to us from one persons point of view. The Marlow figure in the movie is Captain Willard who is sent on a mission similar to the book to find Kurtz. The different way that the story is presented is very important because it gives us a different feel for the story at hand. The book version of the story makes sense having the almost two-narrator feel because when you read, its easy to go back and forth between things easily. When you see something visually, its difficult to go back and forth between narrators because your mind wants to stay with one thing. It was a good decision by Coppola to change it to one narrator and have him