Childhood's End Clarke's Childhood's End Term Paper

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While the children of the present generation become more profoundly advanced, in ways undreamed of by their parents, the children inevitably lose a sense of personal connection with the human beings who gave them birth. The Overlords or powers of the state and fate have become the children's parents, not their biological parents.

Clarke reflects that on one hand this is somewhat positive in its implications. One could argue that a lessening of familial and national ties facilitates the more peaceful future existence envisioned over the course of the novel. But this also means that the parents Jane and George lose their children in some sense. The children do not love their parents in the same way that their parents love them, because the children have become part of a more generalized and advanced universe. "Jeffrey might have been any boy in the world. We call it Total Breakthrough.

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There is no need for any secrecy," states one of the Overlords. (168)

Because their children are so different from themselves, Jane and George have lost a personal part of their understanding of themselves as human. Part of the reason that makes their own imperfect lives worth living was to dream of their children living a similar life as their own. But now the Overlords are Jeffrey and Jenny's nursemaids and parents, not their biological parents. Soberly, the parents reflect that "now they realized that Jeff and Jenny could look after themselves in ways beyond the knowledge of their parents." (171) Thus, the price of technical advancement and of achieving a generalized utopia, in Clarke's view, is the sacrifice what makes us uniquely human and our personal connections to the individual, as opposed to existing as part of a collective, without ties to parents or nations.

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"Childhood's End Clarke's Childhood's End", 10 June 2005, Accessed.4 July. 2025,
https://www.aceyourpaper.com/essays/childhood-end-clarke-childhood-end-66099