모데카이 로쉬월드의 『레벨 7』

Abstract

This study explores how an inverted pyramid society collapses in the aftermath of formidable nuclear attacks in Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7 . In this novel, composed in the form of a diary of a ‘push button’ officer called X-127, Roshwald emphasizes that a society established on a distorted value system in the shape of an inverted pyramid is doomed to failure from the beginning. Humanity’s arrogance and blind faith in science and technology reduces human beings to machine-like half beings. The members of this enclosed and suffocating underground shelter cannot get out of the machine state and end up in irreversible catastrophe. The narrator X-127, however, is transformed from a callous human machine to Homo Empathicus through his reflective record of the world after the Bomb. This research identifies the typical characteristics of the constricted society in Level 7 and examines some similarities and differences between this novel and some other dystopian or post-apocalyptic narratives. It also traces the way X-127’s record of a sequence of events leads to his epistemological transformation as a subjective and independent individual.