Charles Marlow
Marlow's name may be inspired by the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. Conrad's father was a translator of William Shakespeare who doubtless would have known of Marlowe's work as well. Some intertextual interpretations of "Heart of Darkness" have suggested that Marlowe's "The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus" may have influenced Conrad. Charles Marlow describes a character as a "papier-mache Mephistopheles", a reference to the Faust legend. Marlow's and Kurtz's journey up the Congo River in "Heart of Darkness" also has similarities to another work by Marlowe, "Dido, Queen of Carthage", in which Aeneas is stranded on the shore of Libya and meets the African queen Dido.
Kurtz (Heart of Darkness)
Francis Ford Coppola's acclaimed Vietnam War film "Apocalypse Now" (1979) centers on the protagonist's mission to find and kill the renegade Colonel Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando), based on Conrad's character, who has gone rogue far up a river, deep in the Southeast Asian jungle. The script acknowledges "Heart of Darkness" as a source of information, and the last words of Colonel Kurtz, "The horror! The horror!", echo those of his namesake in the novel.