LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Darkness at Noon, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Ideology and Contradiction
The Individual, or the “Grammatical Fiction, vs. the Collective
Logical Reasoning and Bureaucracy
Change and the Laws of History
Truth, Confession, and Performance
Summary
Analysis
In another fragment from Rubashov’s diary, he compares his generation to the apes that looked mockingly on the first Neanderthals and their barbaric ways, a relapse of history.
Rubashov imagines a comparable historical irony, in which one group is destroyed because of its complacent mockery of a new generation.