1.  The motif of the “grammatical fiction” appears several times in Darkness at Noon.  What is meant by this?

2.  What is the role of the individual in Koestler’s story?  Who or what is the agent of historical change?  Who is the revolution’s beneficiary, who receives its fruits, as it were?

3.  Please pay attention to body and mind, to the physical and the rational.  What, if any, relationship is there between the two, and how is it made manifest (if at all!) in the narrative?

4. Why does Rubashov give in to the show trial?  What prevents him from using his superior intellect to denounce the party?  Is it simply that the interrogations wear him down, or is it something more regarding the ideology of the revolution?

5.  Finally, who was right?  Ivanov?  Gletkin?  Rubashov?  Poor 402, in his lonely confinement?

More broadly:

A. Did the Russian revolution have to devour its own?  Is this a process that has to happen in every revolution? Could the revolution survived without the purging of the “old-school?”

B. If we (perhaps arbitrarily) divide the revolutionaries into moderates and hard-liners, who won out (thinking across multiple phases of the revolution)?  Does the in-fighting of these groups follow similar patterns of other revolutions we’ve studied?

C. How was the Russian Revolution affected by the shadow of France in 1789 (specifically, the effects of the Bolsheviks looking to avoid Thermidor)?  How might the revolution have progressed differently if the Bolsheviks had not known about or cared about the French Revolution?