The novel’s second part, “The Werckmeister Harmonies,” opens with János Valuska’s reenactment of a solar eclipse, a performance that establishes his character through the book’s signature literary style. Long, unbroken sentences track Valuska’s thoughts and actions, creating a formal parallel to his unique consciousness. The narrative describes how, for Valuska, the “paraphernalia of the sensible universe […] immediately [drops] away” as he loses himself in the “monumental simplicity of the cosmos” (68). Valuska’s interior world is one of ordered, beautiful, and eternal movement, a stark contrast to the encroaching social disintegration he fails to perceive. In the same way that Krasznahorkai’s prose forced the reader to experience the fraught reality of life on the train in the opening pages of the novel, the prose forces the reader to inhabit Valuska’s perspective, navigating dense, page-long sentences that mirror his obliviousness to the terrestrial threats gathering around him. This stylistic choice reveals Valuska as a figure whose agency is nullified by an all-consuming sense of wonder. His failure to “discern any essential organic difference between his life and the lives of others” (77) renders him a passive observer, moving through the town’s decay as if it were just another part of an inscrutable but ultimately harmonious cosmic design. This represents a stark contrast from all the characters introduced in the previous part, who have all been disillusioned or turned so cynical by the state of their world that they try to leverage the chaos to their advantage.

The reclusive musicologist György Eszter, provides a grimly intellectualized counterpoint to Valuska. György’s monologues articulate a philosophical framework for the town’s decay, centered on the symbol of the Werckmeister harmonies. For György, Andreas Werckmeister’s system of well-tempered musical tuning shows a foundational error of Enlightenment-inspired thinking. He sees this compromise as a trade of authentic, divine harmony for a functional but inherently false order. This motivates his decision to keep his piano in a “natural” dissonant state during his seclusion, a tuning that fails to appeal to the human ear but reflects the essential truth György sees in the universe. When Mrs. Eszter’s ultimatum forces him outside for the first time in months, György is horrified to find his abstract theory made manifest in the town’s physical state. He confronts a world covered in a “seamless, chinkless armour of detritus” (127), a landscape of rubbish and decay that is a tangible motif for a society that has abandoned natural order. György’s worldview illustrates The Irrepressible Chaos of the Universe; he sees the town’s failing social structure as an artificial system, like equal temperament, that has papered over deep, natural dissonances. His abandonment of the “A TIDY YARD, AN ORDERLY HOUSE” movement is thus a recognition of its pathetic inadequacy. He sees the movement as an ironic attempt to impose a superficial human order on a world already succumbing to a more primal, untempered reality.

Valuska’s oblivious worldview allows him to witness the crowd on the precipice of its evolution into a mob. At Kossuth Square, he joins a silent, expectant crowd gathered for something more than just the spectacle of the whale. As Valuska goes on to discover, this growing situation is the design of the unseen demagogue known as The Prince, whose vision of the world is defined by pure nihilism: “ruin is everything” (160). The Prince resembles György in the sense that he sees chaos as the natural state of things; however, like Mrs. Eszter, the Prince weaponizes this natural state to upend the social order. His followers are the very people who feel unmoored by social and political uncertainty, a situation mirroring the power vacuum in Hungary at the end of the communist era. The Prince’s message of destruction offers a perverse sense of meaning to the disenfranchised and fearful, demonstrating The Role of Fear in Totalitarianism. By exploiting the town’s existential dread, the circus transforms the crowd into a mob, revealing how easily a society in collapse can fall prey to a leader who promises the catharsis of annihilation.

The mob’s ensuing rampage culminates in Valuska’s mental health crisis and György’s intellectual surrender to the idea of artificial order. Forced to march with the rioters, Valuska witnesses their brutality firsthand, an experience that shatters his innocent worldview. His identity dissolves as he is subsumed by the mob’s nihilism, his personal cosmos obliterated by the violent chaos. This psychic break illustrates The Impact of Futility on Human Agency, as Valuska’s individuality is erased, and he comes to accept the mob’s vision of a world without order. In the aftermath, György undergoes his own form of surrender. After confirming Valuska is alive and seeing his wife allied with the new military authority, he returns home and undoes his life’s central act of protest: He retunes his piano from its “natural” scale back to the standard Werckmeister equal temperament. For years, Eszter had endured the dissonant sounds of his retuned piano as a form of “daily self-punishment” (119) and a philosophical stand against artificial systems. His return to the Werckmeister harmonies is a final, quiet act of resignation: an admission that his intellectual resistance is futile and an acceptance of the functional, if false, new order that has violently imposed itself upon the town.