The limitations the novel imposed upon itself (in terms of setting, character, and historical context) leaves room for many potential pitfalls—especially that self-obsessed, self-consuming quality so fatal to prison dramas. But Darkness At Noon avoided them all, either by expanding itself through flashbacks or by controlling its narrative so that every detail had a function. Even Rubashov’s political musings and psychological meanderings served a point.
One's respect for Koestler must increase considerably when one realizes that he worked out all the details behind the show trial confessions decades before they were revealed. (Just think of the extent of his psychological insight into the minds of both the prisoners and the interrogators.)
“We have brought some of the accused to submit by applying physical pressure. Others by promising to save their head—or the heads of their loved ones who were hostages in our hands. For you, Comrade Rubashov, there is no promise and no deal to be made.”
Not only that, Koestler also worked out an internal logic of the revolutionaries that rationalizes their actions, fitting seemingly senseless behavior into boxes of rigorous pro and contra. In effect, Rubashov recognizes that they, the revolutionaries, were the pioneering scientists and experimenters of history. The problem was, as he stated himself, “Experiments in physics can be repeated a thousand times, but experiments in history only once. Danton and Saint-Just can be sent to the guillotine one time only, and even if it later turns out that larger submarines may have been the right choice after all, nothing will bring Comrade Bogrov back to life.” The job of the revolutionary is to grasp “the laws of motion governing the swing” of absolutism to democracy and back again, to stop the swing if he can, or if he cannot, to push the swing from absolutism to democracy. To that end, the revolutionary is ready to sacrifice anything, himself included. It is proper, it is moral, for the revolutionary to “publicly forswear one’s convictions,” because “social utility is the only moral criterion we recognise.” The morality of the revolutionary is a scale of utility. Therefore, agents of utility are not humans but chess pieces, and the termination of their period of utility is not ‘death’ but ‘liquidation’. Therefore, it is not only necessary, but eminently proper and moral, to manipulate the “x” factor in history—“the anonymous masses, the people.” To be a good revolutionary is to believe in the absolute truth of utility. As Gletkin puts it, “what is true is what serves mankind, and whatever harms it is a lie.”
Once assured that his every action is useful to the advancement of society, the revolutionary is assured of his own infallibility. It does not matter that Number One’s speeches and essays convey “an admirable consistency in oversimplifying and vulgarizing true connections;” what matters is that these oversimplifications and vulgarizations are socially useful “catechisms” for the masses. In short: to be infallible is to be invariably useful.