Stalker (1979 film) of the "Time Out Film Guide" has compared "Stalker" to Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now", also released in 1979, and argued that "as a journey to the heart of darkness" "Stalker" looks "a good deal more persuasive than Coppola's." As well, "Slant Magazine" reviewer Nick Schager has praised the film as an "endlessly pliable allegory about human consciousness". In Schager's view "Stalker" shows "something akin to the essence of what man is made of: a tangled knot of memories, fears, fantasies, nightmares, paradoxical impulses, and a yearning for something that's simultaneously beyond our reach and yet intrinsic to every one
Joseph Conrad Conrad or any of his narrators, personified or otherwise, claim superiority on the part of Europeans on the grounds of alleged genetic or biological difference". If Conrad or his novel is racist, it is only in a weak sense, since "Heart of Darkness" acknowledges racial distinctions "but does not suggest an essential superiority" of any group. Achebe's reading of "Heart of Darkness" can be (and has been) challenged by a reading of Conrad's other African story, "An Outpost of Progress", which has an omniscient narrator, rather than the embodied narrator, Marlow. Some younger scholars, such as Masood Ashraf Raja, have