Characters
The main character is Nicholas Salmanovitch Rubashov, a man in his fifties of age, based on "a number of men who were the victims of the so-called Moscow trials," several of whom "were personally known to the author." Rubashov is a stand-in for the Old Bolsheviks as a group, and Koestler uses him to explore their actions at the 1938 Moscow Show Trials.
Secondary characters include some fellow prisoners:
- No. 402 is a Czarist army officer and veteran inmate.
- "Rip Van Winkle", an old revolutionary demoralized by 20 years of solitary confinement and further imprisonment.
- Hare-Lip, he "sends his greetings" to Rubashov, but insists on keeping his name secret.
Two other secondary characters never make a direct appearance but are mentioned frequently:
- No. 1, representing Joseph Stalin, dictator of the USSR. He is symbolized by a picture, a "well-known color print, which hung over every bed or sideboard in the country and stared at people with its frozen eyes."
- Old Bolsheviks. They are represented by an image in his "mind's eye, a big photograph in a wooden frame: the delegates to the first congress of the Party," in which they sat "at a long wooden table, some with their elbows propped on it, others with their hands on their knees, bearded and earnest."
Rubashov has two interrogators:
- Ivanov, a comrade from the civil war and old friend.
- Gletkin, a young man characterized by starching his uniform so that it "cracks and groans" whenever he moves.
Read more about this topic: Darkness At Noon
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“Of the other characters in the book there is, likewise, little to say. The most endearing one is obviously the old Captain Maksim Maksimich, stolid, gruff, naively poetical, matter-of- fact, simple-hearted, and completely neurotic.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“A criminal trial is like a Russian novel: it starts with exasperating slowness as the characters are introduced to a jury, then there are complications in the form of minor witnesses, the protagonist finally appears and contradictions arise to produce drama, and finally as both jury and spectators grow weary and confused the pace quickens, reaching its climax in passionate final argument.”
—Clifford Irving (b. 1930)
“It is open to question whether the highly individualized characters we find in Shakespeare are perhaps not detrimental to the dramatic effect. The human being disappears to the same degree as the individual emerges.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)