A Critical Examination of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon

Abstract

<p>In Darkness at Noon the third person narrative and the structure of the story itself are dictated solely by the polemical intent. Koestler wants to force the reader to relive Rubashov's struggle to maintain his individual identity despite overwhelming pressure to adopt that of the Communist Party. His intellect is already so molded to this group that only in his emotions, most of which he has repressed, can he find the seeds of his authentic self. The narrative technique encourages the reader to view the story through the aperture of this inner self but when Rubashov shifts his centre of consciousness to his reasoning persona the reader's perspective is destroyed, along with much of the moral and aesthetic force of the novel.</p> <p>The unconscious as a subject invites the use of symbols. Those of Koestler grow naturally out of, the facts of his story; they even reinforce one another, and spawn related images until some passages approach allegory. They are also useful litmus papers for detecting the emotional attachment to Marxist ideology Koestler retains.</p> <p>In this novel Koestler dramatizes his arguments by embodying all those he wants us to approve in Rubashov and all those he wants us to doubt in the Party; thus he controls our responses very precisely. But the split in Rubashov designed to clarify Koestler's ideas also destroys his human quality and so undermines the tragedy of Darkness<br />at Noon.</p> <p>It is not the didacticism but the subject matter of this novel that undercuts its aesthetic quality. The narrative technique pulls the reader inside Rubashov's emotions but when Rubashov loses contact with this self, the reader loses his window on events and his<br />concern about them. And, in a novel about individual freedom, the process of making explicit the normally implicit motives of an individual celebrates the philosophy of determinism rather than freedom. However, the loss of the reader's connection with the centre of consciousness and the difficulty of communicating the nature of freedom are overcome by the fascination of the contradictory emotions aroused by the ideas in Darkness at Noon.</p>