Darkness at Noon
Arthur Koestler(1940)
Extract
The cell door slammed behind Rubashov.
A man sits in a cell and reconstructs the logic by which the revolution he served now demands his confession and his death. Arthur Koestler published this novel in 1940, drawing on the Moscow show trials to create in Rubashov a figure who embodies the tragedy of idealism subordinated to historical necessity. Rubashov believed the individual was nothing, the Party everything, and now the Party requires him to be nothing in the most literal sense. The novel's power lies in its psychological portraiture: a mind trained in dialectics turning those instruments upon itself, finding that every argument for resistance contains the seeds of its own refutation. The cruelest prisons are built from the prisoner's own convictions.
If you loved this
Orwell wrote the companion nightmare: Koestler shows the interrogation room, Orwell shows the world that built it.
Kafka anticipated the logic of the show trial: guilt that exists before the crime.
Dostoevsky sits another man in a room with his conscience, but Raskolnikov at least has the option of repentance.