The modern literature of disillusionment introduces a variation on this old theme. The discontent is localized to one ideology--Communism. Mary McCarthy states one of its basic causes in _The Oasis_ when she says that Will Taub’s “disillusionment with the Movement had sprung largely from its concentration on narrowly nationalistic aims and its abandonment of an insurgent ideology.” In its original use, the term “literature of disillusionment” referred primarily to the body of work of a group of writers who had turned away from Communism. But for the purposes of this study it is just as fruitful to focus on the creations rather than their authors. The best of these novels is unquestionably Koestler’s _Darkness at Noon_. It is outstanding not only as a psychological portrait in depth, but also as an interpretation of an important phenomenon. Rubashov is at once an individual and a mirror of forces at work in modern international politics. His journey has taken him from exalted participation in revolution, through consolidation of its gains, to a final questioning of the worth of the whole agonizing process. But his life has been bound up so completely with the cause that even his final renunciation is tinged with haunting doubt. Lying in his cell, one of the last survivors of the old guard, he is unable to repress it: The horror which No. 1 emanated, above all consisted in the possibility that he was in the right, and that all those whom he had killed had to admit, even with the bullet in the back of their necks, that he conceivably might be in the right. Rubashov’s disillusionment springs from the fact that the light has gone out of the revolutionary movement, that what was to become a new paradise has become an old hell. The dictatorship of the proletariat has evolved into the tyranny of No. 1; the new man has grown into a Neanderthaler. Instead of a promised land, Rubashov has returned from his foreign assignments to find a country where factory workers are shot as saboteurs for negligence caused by fatigue. His conclusion that the regime’s error was caused by abandonment of ethical standards is central to the _bouleversement_ he undergoes. But even despite this basic departure from Communist thought, it is important to recognize that he is still a Marxist. He even elaborates the old dialectic in prison with his “theory of the relative maturity of the masses.” His participation in his mock trial emphasizes the ambivalence he feels. One passage explains this behavior and that of some of the men to whom Koestler dedicated the novel: