ery near the time of death, does a person grasp the big picture. He describes Kurtz’s last moments "as though a veil had been rent (Conrad, 239)." Kurtz’s last "supreme moment of complete knowledge (Conrad, 239)," showed him how horrible the human soul really can be. Marlow can only speculate as to what Kurtz saw that caused him to exclaim "The horror! The horror," but later adds that "Since I peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare... it was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness... he had summed up, he had judged (Conrad, 241)." Marlow guesses that Kurtz suddenly knew everything and discovered how horrible the duplicity of man can be. Marlow learned through Kurtz’s death, and he now knows that inside every human is this horrible, evil side. Francis Coppola’s movie, Apocalypse Now, is based loosely upon Conrad’s book. Captain Willard is a Marlow who is on a mission into Cambodia during the Vietnam war to find and kill an insane Colonel Kurtz. Coppola's Kurtz, as he experienced his epiphany of horror, was an officer and a sane, successful, brilliant leader. Like Conrad’s Kurtz, Coppola shows us a man who was once very well respected, but was corrupted by the horror of war and the cultures he met. Coppola tells us in Hearts of Darkness that Kurtz’s major fear is "being white in a non white jungle (Bahr)." The story Kurtz tells Willard about the Special Forces going into a village, inoculating the children for polio and going away, and the communists coming into the village and cutting off all the children's inoculated arms, is the main evidence for this implication in that film. This is when Kurtz begins to go mad, he "wept like some grandmother" when, called back by a villager, he saw the pile of little arms, a sophisticated version of the "escalating horrors." What Kurtz meant by "escalat...
