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Chapter 20
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
The colonists of New Athens are gathered to watch their children board the Overlords’ ship and be taken away from them. The children themselves walk silently, some carrying the infants and those who cannot walk on their own. An Overlord ship has landed on the shore and the children are climbing aboard. Jean and George think they see Jeffrey boarding the ship. He turns his head towards them, but they cannot know if there is any recognition left in his eyes. The doors of the ship close.
Now that humanity has been divided into two different races, mixing them could prove deadly. The children loading themselves onto the ship to be taken away evokes images of immigrants or pilgrims, loading onto a ship to travel to a new home, a new destiny, a new future.
Themes
For what humanity remains, some choose to live out their days and some choose to die. On New Athens, Jean wakes one night, grabbing George by the hand. They rise and walk to the nursery and embrace. George realizes that he does love Jean, regretting his indifference toward her. She says goodbye. Beneath the island, the uranium in the volcano reacts, exploding. “And the island rose to meet the dawn.”
The formation and operation of New Athens was an act of human assertion, a rejection of the relative passivity that humanity had settled into while living in utopia. Rather than slowly living out their days waiting for time and old age to take them, the colonists decide to meet their death assertively as well and die with the island.
Themes
