Darkness At Noon

The following is actually a literary analysis I wrote after reading this book for school this past year. I thought that I would despise it, and actually as I was writing the paper I realized how good the writing and portrayal of characters was. WARNING: There are a couple spoilers in the essay! I don't remember too much about the content other than yes, it was in a Stalinist prison, which is awful in itself. There is a bit of swearing at times and a little bit of coarse joking with another inmate about women; evidently not many people had consciences about that sort of thing. This I would say is for high school ages and up. If you have read Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, this would be a good follow-up. And if you haven't, it would be a good introduction to that sort of place and time. Not too many people I have met have read this book, and some haven't heard of it, but I think it is far more worth reading than, say, "Percy Jackson." (Sorry, die-hard Riordan fans, but somebody's gotta say it.) 

Yeah, the cover looks weird. 

Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon was originally published in 1941, after several tumultuous years in the author’s life.  He left the communist party in 1938, was later arrested twice, and finally sentenced to death, only released through last-minute British intervention.  Darkness at Noon was most likely inspired by Koestler’s experiences with the dictatorship of Stalin—what he saw both as a member and an enemy of the Party.  Through the life of Nicolas Salmanovich Rubashov, Darkness at Noon chronicles the hopelessness of the Russian Revolution and the despair faced by those caught in its midst.
The story begins somewhat in the middle, with the main character Rubashov being shoved into a prison cell for a reason unknown, at first, to both him and the reader.  Rubashov is a middle-aged member of Stalin’s Party who was arrested for supposed aggression and planned rebellion against the Party.  During his captivity, Rubashov gets the chance to look back on his life and how he lived it; while he paces the floor of his prison cell, we learn about his past experiences from his reflections on all that had happened to him.  He remembers all his history with the Party and interactions with other members throughout the years, finally realizing that all this time he had been obeying the Party and harming others, not for some ‘greater good,’ as he would like to believe, but simply to save his own skin.  He had been arrested once before, released by affirming another person guilty instead of himself, constantly following Stalin’s Party because there was nothing else to follow.  Throughout the whole book and his flashbacks, he seems to be asking himself:  “Is there something more?” 
In Rubashov’s interrogations, Koestler’s characters show great understanding of the philosophies and inner workings of Stalin’s regime.  “One may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions,” says one of his interrogators, summing up one of the main points of Stalinist philosophy—in everything, emotion and conscience were replaced by a sort of brutal logic or arithmetic in which people were thought of as numbers, manipulated to work out an equation.  After Rubashov decides to capitulate and confess to “anti-revolutionary activities” he did not take part in, he remarks (through a tapped code to another prisoner) “We have replaced decency by reason,” and sadly, the practice of replacing decency and compassion with a twisted reason seems to have been widely acceptable in that time.  
Most people brought up in the time of Stalin were made into simple machines to calculate the figures given them and manipulate the masses of people below them, even when they themselves were unknowingly being manipulated by their superiors.  While pacing in his cell, Rubashov likens the situation to a “grotesque comedy”—those who truly trusted in the dictatorship and the promises made by the Stalinist government saw only the stage and not the machinery behind it; machinery that would be ridiculous and false if exposed for what it truly was.  Rubashov seems to understand the philosophies of the Party better than many who truly trusted in Stalin’s promises, and while he plays his part in the comedy, he wants nothing more than to return to his real life.
Even though this Stalinist philosophy is what Rubashov alleges to cling to, his musings and wonderings present a different take on the subject.  As he ponders over his past, he begins to think that perhaps one plus one does not equal two where the lives of human beings are concerned.  His torture of being questioned hour after hour, not allowed to rest or sleep for days, in the end overcomes him and, when asked to admit to his “crime,” some of his inner disgust against the Party emerges in his words:  “I plead guilty to not having understood the fatal compulsion behind the policy of the Government, and to have therefore held oppositional views.  I plead guilty to having followed sentimental impulses, and in so doing to have been led into contradiction with historical necessity.  I have lent my ear to the laments of the sacrificed, and thus became deaf to the arguments which proved the necessity to sacrifice them.  I plead guilty to having rated the question of guilt and innocence higher than that of utility and harmfulness.  Finally, I plead guilty to having placed the idea of man above the idea of mankind.” 
In the end, Rubashov is sentenced to death.  As he paces in his cell again, reflecting, he realizes that it was too late for him.  He had followed this way of life for too long and there was no escape from it now, nothing left for him but a bullet to the head—and in this realization he becomes strangely contented.  At his trial, he asks, “For what am I dying?” and cannot think of an answer; he feels that his life was a waste in submission to the Party.  However, he manages to find hope in future generations, that perhaps they would have the courage he did not, the courage to stand up against the evil and revive the country.  Rubashov never seemed afraid, only wishful—he wished to return to a quiet job in the library and study astronomy. 
The story ends as Rubashov is taken from his cell, led down the hallway, and then is shot.  The last paragraph of the book ends, “A wave slowly lifted him up.  It came from afar and traveled sedately on, a shrug of eternity.”  There is never any explicit statement of spiritual reconciliation or even understanding in Rubashov; though spiritual matters are mentioned several times, the reader is left in the middle of wondering what exactly Rubashov did believe.  It is hard to tell whether he was a coward or not, and whether he really cared about anything.  He would have followed the Party to the ends of the earth, with his conscience constantly screaming at him and the logic of the Party constantly shoving that conscience aside, and yet he found himself unable to put any trust in the future peace that was promised.  
Darkness at Noon is not an uplifting book.  It exposes the inner workings of Stalin’s Party, from the perspective of a man who was a member of the Party that he inwardly hated.  In the time when the book was written, many people had no idea of what really happened in Stalinist Russia, and I imagine that this book was written partly to show them and explain to them how terrible the situation really was.  Koestler dedicated the book itself to the number of men who were victims of the Moscow Show Trials, and the character of Rubashov was created as more or less a tribute to them; a tribute to those who were caught in their hidden fear with the belief that decency was more important than reason and that conscience was more important than brutal logic.  The story of Nicolas Salmanovich Rubashov is not of any one particular person—it is simply the story of the countless number of people who suffered under Stalin’s rule and wondered:  “Is there something more?”