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The Sellout. In the novel, Mark innocently relays a story that U.S. security agents have concocted with the deliberate purpose of trapping Physicist Bloch in a lapse of loyalty. But the question of why Sebastian indicts his friend with a damaging yarn of his own is only glancingly answered. Chevalier hints that merely working on the A-bomb has corrupted Sebastian's moral sense. Another suggestion is that he has "sold out" to a nebulous power elite and forgotten the "little people." This charge reduces itself to guilt by dissociation: Bloch's crime is not so much libeling a friend as it is ditching his left-wing pals and their causes.
Chevalier's most tantalizing implication is that Bloch, blind as Oedipus in his pride, believes that only he can control the use and abuse of the superbomb. In this light, Mark Ampter is a human sacrifice to Bloch's God complex. This^ view may be colored by Chevalier's personal resentment (although he claims that "this book was written not with hatred but with love," the novel's underlying tone suggests an ex-worshipper stomping on a fallen idol). But strangely enough, the Atomic Energy Commission came to a very similar conclusion about Oppenheimer. In its own bureaucratic language, it also spoke about pride and arrogance of judgment: "The record shows that Dr. Oppenheimer has consistently placed himself outside the rules which govern others."