Word: rubashov
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...excel in sowing doubt. Without transparency, and allowed unfettered access to my own imagination, I started to question everyone, including my own friends. Had one of them sold me out? Who could I trust? It was a path of suspicion that led unexpectedly to myself. I began to understand Rubashov in his cell, in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, a man driven by his own logic to accept and even defend the judgment of his tormentors. Maybe I deserved it, maybe I had it coming. Not yet accused, I was already guilty. I had convicted myself...
...late for anything I do to make a difference in how I am regarded by posterity." This has been apparent to the reader all along and it's never become clear why posterity will regard him at all. Swados never establishes Lumen as a representative figure like Rubashov in Darkness at Noon: at best, he's a composite of Bertrand Russell and William O. Douglas and maybe some World War I pacifist like Roger Baldwin. All we know is that we're supposed to have read about him in the newspapers and that like another diarist. Leon Trotsky, he finds...
...modern society. So much that Vandenberg's therapist-interrogator says is plainly reasonable; the Soviets, by his plausible account, really are providing the greatest good for the greatest number. Very briefly, the reader is reminded of the coldly logical dialogues in Darkness at Noon between the old Bolshevik Rubashov and his inquisitor, Gletkin. But little in Vandenberg's sulky response is heroic, or even intelligent. In effect, he simply shrugs. He is not interested in the greatest number. All he wants is for society to leave him alone...
Nerve and high intelligence are needed to write at Koestler's level, and Author Lange does not seem to have either. The power of Darkness at Noon lay in the fact that the inquisitor Gletkin, proceeding logically and fairly from Rubashov's own assumptions, forced him to assent to the value of his own execution. Lange, on the other hand, flies into fantasy. There is a power failure at the brain laundry, and Vandenberg climbs the electric fence and escapes...
...devotion persists throughout the unremitting interrogation. "Better be wrong inside the party than right outside it" is the credo he clings to, recalling Rubashov in Darkness at Noon. But carefully, exhaustively, his interrogators ensnare him in a network of lies and half-truths. The process of psychic and physical torture erode his integrity, and eventually his inquisitors are able to persuade him to sign sentences and paragraphs that finally accumulate into a phony confession branding him a "Trotskyite" and a U.S. spy. It requires a seemingly endless 138 minutes for his interrogation and torture to resolve into the obligatory conclusion...