Darkness at Noon - Characters

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.