The Children of Men Literary Elements

Dystopian novel

The action of the novel takes place in Britain in the year 2021.

The narrator of the novel is Theo and he presents the events from a first person subjective point of view. Some chapters however are recalled from a third person objective point of view, offering a more detached perspective.

Tragic, fatalistic

The antagonist is Xan and the protagonist is Theo.

The major conflict appears to be in the novel between the population that still is hopeful about the future and the population that rejected the idea that something could change for the better. The latter group became resentful towards the first group and at times they went as far as to attack the first group for daring to be different.

The novel reaches its climax when it is revealed that Julian is pregnant.

The first interaction between Julian and Theo foreshadows the way the two will continue to communicate and the way in which their relationship will progress.

Theo mentions that for a long time, the media portrayed him and his cousin as being extremely close. Theo reveals that the information was an understatement and that he was not that close to his cousin. In fact, he felt at times as if they had nothing in common.

Theo talks about the way his and his wife’s relationship progressed after he accidentally killed their daughter. The couple no longer stayed in the same home and they chose instead to move into a new house. There, the couple chose to sleep in separate bedrooms and to live generally separate lives. The narrator alludes that their situation was not that uncommon and that infidelity was quite normal in their society. Through this, the author alludes that society and the situation in which they found themselves in forced them to live separate lives, to live in different rooms without any emotional contact with others whatsoever.

An important imagery appears in the sixth chapter when the unnamed narrator describes a scene he witnessed outside a church. Then, a woman was pushing a stroller with a doll inside it and another woman came, took the doll and destroyed it. The image is important because it shows that despite everything that was happening, there were still those who chose to remain hopeful and who refused to believe that the future could not be changed.

The attitude exhibited by the population is ironic because even though they knew they will most likely go extinct, they still put great effort into preserving their historical heritage and saving their historical documents.

A parallel can be drawn between the role attributed to Julian’s son and the role given to Jesus Christ in the Bible. Theo believes that the unborn child belongs to the world and that his or her purpose is to save the world. The child is more important than just a simple baby that may come into the world since the child symbolizes hope and the idea that there is still hope for the humanity as a whole.

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