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Chapter 18
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Childhood’s End, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Science and Mysticism
Benevolent Dictatorship and Freedom
Utopia and Creative Apathy
Individuality, Globalization, and Progress
The Fate of Humanity
Summary
Analysis
In time, Jeffrey’s dreams bleed into his waking life. He stops going to school, and the family stops seeing friends. George and Jean realize that they do not even need to care for the children anymore. Jennifer seems to feed herself, though she never moves, and there is a terrifying aura of untapped power around her. Occasionally, she moves the furniture around in the nursery.
Jeffrey continues to become a transformed being and less George and Jean’s child. Since Jennifer is already long gone, much farther into the transition than Jeffrey, George and Jean’s parenthood effectively ends while their children are still living with them. The tragedy has struck before their children are physically gone.
Themes
George and Jean love Jeff as well as they can, but they know that he will soon be like Jennifer, entirely beyond their grasp. He too, often seems unaware of anything in the world around him, though he has not yet developed any physical powers like Jennifer has. Even so, his mind is taking in incredible amounts of knowledge that will eventually consume what is left of him as the boy, Jeffrey Greggson.
With the absorption of vast amounts of knowledge, Jeffrey surpasses even the Overlords; he is more powerful, can travel farther, understands the further limits of the universe. In this way, the Overlords, who represent science and rationalism, have been overtaken by a small human child and his capacity to unlock paranormal powers, a clear symbol of mysticism.
Themes
Though Jeffrey and Jennifer are the first children to turn, the phenomenon spreads quickly, affecting most of the children less than ten years old on Earth. Civilization ends. Without children, humanity has no future. Its spirit is broken. But rather than panic, a terrible numbness overtakes the earth. Its cities fall silent. Karellen makes his last speech.
Seemingly overnight, the utopia of Earth, the bright future that New Athens had envisioned for humanity, ends. It is notable that it is only young children who begin the process of transcendence, implying that such latent power can only be tapped into by those whose minds are still open to the mystical, who have yet to grow skeptical and too beholden to scientific rationalism.
Themes
