Images of Children in Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies

This paper discusses that the image of the children has a function as vehicles to reveal the intimate and close relationship between themselves and adults who victimise children under the oppressive authority for their social and ideological benefits in McEwan’s novel The Cement Garden . The image of childhood is a social and cultural  construction. As Pifer asserts “for novelists this image has undergone radical transformation since the nineteenth century, when Charles Dickens and his contemporary Ariès translated the Romantic idyll of natural innocence into touching versions of ‘poor children’ set adrift in a harsh and inhumane world.” 10 As the child image has changed from period to period, its reflection has been altered in fiction as well.