Shadows Of The Mind: Heart Of Darkness, Apocolypse Now Comparison Essay

Shadows of the Mind  
When an animal is taken from its natural state it becomes somewhat lost mentally and has to find a way to either cope withs new environment or else it will not survive. Humans go through the same process somewhat, though humans will not always die when put in a new environment; they will have mental reprocussions from the change. Be it changing schools or moving to a third world country. Although there are some who would thrive in smaller changes, seeing them as challenges, when put through an extreme change transission is extremely difficult and sometimes not possible. This is what is illustrated by all of these works: Heart of Darkness, Hollow Men, and Apocolypse Now.
One point of interest in these works, especially Heart of Darkness and Apocolypse Now, is the exterior view of society on those who have “snapped” or gone insane. Today insanity is a legal term that is defined as “when people cannot be held responsible for their actions, or judged incompetent to manage their own affairs, because of mental illness”. But what defines this abnormal behavior? Society does. Society determines what is deemed abnormal. Although there are people I see on the street that I would label as abnormal or insane, isociety as a whole does not. Certain aspects or our own society in other cultures are seen as insane. During the Stone Age, many believed that demon possession was a primary cause f mental disorder, and one of the treatments for this at the time was to drill holes in the skull to allow evil to escape. To us, this procudure would be insane but for them it was a remedy. In the works of Conrad and Coppola the character Kurtz is seen as insame by one culture and reviered as a god by the other. So who’s right?   There really isnt a straightforward answer to this but the story is told from the prespective of a society that would see his behavior as insane, and he is marked as such.
Humans in different environments, especially less civilized...