Darkness at Noon: The Grammatical Fiction: 2 Summary & Analysis

Rubashov paces his cell, knowing that before midnight he’ll be dead. During the trial, he’d been seized by one final moment of self-pity. He had been tempted to shout at his accusers like Danton before the Revolutionary Tribunal, a speech he’d learned by heart as a boy. But he’d recognized that it was too late, too late for them all: no one could unveil the truth to the world like Danton. Some like Hare-lip were silenced by fear, others by cowardice, others by the hope to save their families, or even to do a final service to the Party by being cast as scapegoats.

Rubashov thinks that they were all guilty, though not of the deeds they were accused of. They had to act in a certain way, and now, for him, the performance is over. Now, his last few hours on earth belong to the silent partner, the “grammatical fiction,” which starts where logical thought ends. He taps 2—4 on the wall, the word “I,” for the first time. There’s no answer.

Rubashov has been thinking over certain puzzles, the meaning of suffering, and the difference between meaningful and meaningless suffering. Revolution could only try to remove senseless suffering by radically increasing meaningful suffering. Was this justified? It was justified in abstraction, he thinks, but in the concrete it no longer applies. Neither the Party nor the silent partner has an answer for him.

At times Rubashov remembers a tune, or the folded hands of the Pietà, or certain childhood memories, and he reaches what the religious call “ecstasy” or “contemplation,” or what modern psychologists call the “oceanic sense.” His personality does seem to dissolve into the infinite sea, but the whole sea also seems contained in one grain of salt. No longer is Rubashov ashamed at this kind of metaphysical musing. He looks out the window, and the patch of blue sky reminds him of one he saw as a boy lying in the grass at his father’s park.

Rubashov recalls astrophysics research arguing that the world’s volume is finite, even if space has no boundaries. He remembers that he read about this during his first arrest in Germany, when an illegal Party organ had been smuggled into his cell, sandwiched between a story about a mill strike, and an article about the discovery that the universe was finite, though the page was torn off halfway through.

Rubashov recognizes that the Party considers the infinite suspect, and even fails to recognize its existence. The Party denies individual free will even while requiring individual self-sacrifice. For 40 years Rubashov has fought against economic fatality, the main sickness of humanity, but wherever he’s applied the surgeon’s knife, a new wound has appeared, and the equation continues to fail. He’s buried the old, illogical morality, fought against the “oceanic sense,” but has been led straight into the absurd.

Rubashov thinks that for 40 years he’s been led astray by pure reason. Perhaps men should not be ripped away from older traditions, he thinks. No. 1 had ruined the ideal of the Social state like medieval Popes had ruined the ideal of a Christian empire. It was the story of Richard and the Pietà that had prompted him to begin to realize this, but he’d never admitted fully that there was an error in the whole mathematical system of thought. When he asks himself why he’s dying he has no answer: it’s a mistake in the system, he thinks.

Rubashov thinks that perhaps later a new movement will arise with a sense both of economic fatality and the “oceanic sense.” Perhaps these people will teach that a man is not just the quotient of one million divided by one million, and that only pure means can justify ends. Rubashov stops pacing, and hears muffled drumming from down the corridor.