Similarities between Heart of Darkness, Hollow Men and Apocalypse Now In today's literary world there are many different texts that have interconnected literary meaning through their references to each other and to other works . I will compare and draw similarities between TS Eliot's The Hollow Men, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. These three sources have many different references to each other in different ways. In T. S. Eliot's The Hollow Men, he begins the poem with the title and under the title uses the famous line "Mistah Kurtz- he dead" from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. . This famous phrase is said by one of the servants about Mr. Kurtz dying and all the natives were shocked by his death. Eliot uses this phrase at the beginning of the poem because he is making a comparison between the hollow men and Kurtz. He does this because Kurtz's idea of ​​the civilization he wanted to create ultimately did not turn out the way he wanted. Kurtz's ideas lead to his downfall in the film Apocalypse Now. He is also considered empty due to his ideas and inability to face reality. This is similar to empty men because they don't know what they will become. They have an idea of ​​what they want to be but they know it will never happen. Hollow men really have no choice about what they will be; they just let it happen. These empty men are waiting to go to the "dream realm of death", but they don't know if they will ever get there. Eliot talks about these empty men and these men can be compared to the people who follow Kurtz. They are all empty people because they follow this radical figure and don't have the......middle of paper......Hollow Men. They show a lot of similarities and there is a reasoning behind the scene from the movie Apocalypse Now; where Kurtz is reading Eliot's poem. Everything is tied together and has a specific meaning. This shows that different literary sources can be used to help other literary texts. Conrad's Heart of Darkness lays the foundation of the character of Mr. Kurtz and then Eliot and Coppola portray this character through their artwork. Their literary meanings tie all of these works together to make them all unique in their own way. Works Cited Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Norton. New York. 1963. Eliot, T.S. The Hollow Men. 1925.Jain, Manju. A critical reading of the selected poems of T. S. Eliot. Oxford University Press. New York. 1991Southam, BC A student's guide to the selected poems of T. S. Eliot. Faber and Faber. Boston. 1968.