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Darkness at Noon | The Limits of Ideology: Koestler’s Darkness at Noon

In the following essay, David Lewis Schaefer examines Koestler’s criticism of Marxism in Darkness at Noon and defends Koestler’s use of the novel form for the story.

Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler’s novel of the Soviet purge trials, does not make good bedtime reading. Considered as a historical novel, moreover, it may be contended (as Irving Howe has done) that the book is “crucially flawed” both historically and artistically: Koestler’s account of his protagonist’s “gradual surrender to Stalinism” as the product of a purely “dialectical process within his own thought” seems “manifestly untrue to our sense of human behavior” and reduces “an enormously difficult and complex problem” to “abstract and...

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