(De)Constructing Heart of Darkness and its Cinematic Adaptations

Many voices claim that, with the emergence of the cinema, the time when readers had the power to interpret the narration on their own, creating in their minds a world in consonance with their thoughts and beliefs, has passed and that a new type of ‘reading’ has emerged, one that leaves no room for imagination, since image works against free interaction with the text. The chief ambition of this paper was to prove that such perspectives are misshaped, that a middle ground may be achieved, that both novel and film may be valued for their multiplicity.Although two different grids for analysis were applied in this study, on the one hand looking into the narrative pattern of the novel, and on the other, understanding how the camera may replace the writer's pen when (re)creating, the whole demarche was dedicated to a comparative and contrastive ‘reading’ of the mutations that become visible the moment the linguistic medium is replaced by the visual. Thus, the present paper intends to study the architecture of both narrative and cinematic texts, deconstructing the basic elements that stand at their core.