The Fact Is I No Longer

From Darkness at Noon (1940), voiced by Rubashov, the novel's protagonist and a composite of the Old Bolsheviks who confessed at Stalin's show trials. Throughout the narrative Rubashov has operated by an iron certainty that the Party is always right; the moment that certainty cracks, he loses the only framework that gave his sacrifices meaning. Koestler wrote the novel to explain how disciplined revolutionaries could publicly confess to fabricated crimes — the answer, he suggests, is that once a man surrenders his own moral judgment to a system, he has already lost himself.