Individual Text Feature: Enders Game

Safeeyah Iverson


Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card takes place in a distant future where mankind lives under the threat of a second invasion by a hive minded alien race called the buggers. Having only very nearly avoided extermination, the worlds governments granted the International Fleet (IF) were tasked with finding the next military genius that can command humanity to victory. To that end the Battle School was created. Children with potential are watched using monitors that plug into their brains and allow the IF to watch and hear everything that they do in order for them to assess who has the potential to be this next military genius or at least to serve under them.

Andrew “Ender” Wiggin, is the third child in family, something that is forbidden by population laws and yet was ordered to be done by the government in the hopes that he might be a middle ground between his two genius siblings, Peter being too hard and Valentine too soft. The novel begins with Ender’s monitor finally being removed. He is 6 years old and has been wearing if for 3 years, far longer than the average, and yet another thing that isolates him from his peers. The readers know from the small cut scene in the first chapter, which we also learn depict the “teachers” of battle school talking, that Ender has been chosen to go to Battle School and even further chosen as the long awaited genius commander. Ender is still being monitored though and his final test is to see how he deals with himself without its protection when he is surrounded by “enemies” in the form of school boy bullies.

Enders swift and seemingly vicious dispatch of his main tormentor, Stilson, who he beats nearly unconscious so that “he can win all the other battles” and make his enemies fear him enough to leave him alone, convinces the IF and Colonel Graff that he is ready. It also sets the scene for us to realize exactly what kind of world Ender is going into. Conversations between Colonel Graff and Major Anderson introduce every chapter providing the reader with a view of the world outside of and an explanation of their actions. Enders Introduction to battle school is ruthless and from the beginning the odds are deliberately stacked against him and yet each time he pushes through to prosper. The cost however becomes greater each time and several times throughout his “training” Ender is left without hope, slipping into what appears to be depression. All throughout he is continuously being psychoanalyzed by Graff who is largely responsible for ensuring that Ender becomes who he needs to be no matter the cost, pushing him as hard as he can without breaking him. By the time Ender reaches his peak, now a commander of the best army in the school and undefeated despite continuous rule changes made in order to make him lose, he has made many enemies and is more isolated than ever before.

This envy and isolation culminates in a bathroom brawl between Ender and his former commander Bonzo who Ender in self-defense unknowingly kills. Despite being unaware of this, the violence of the situation stirs in Ender a familiar fear, that he is secretly as cruel as his sociopathic genius brother Peter, and after winning a final battle against an unprecedented two armies, Ender is refuses to participate in Battle School any longer.

Meanwhile on earth, his siblings Valentine and Peter are poised to be as significant as Ender himself. At Peter's urging the two children take up the names Locke and Demosthenes on the nets, the two write from opposite ends of the political spectrum, stirring up unrest and influencing the political hemisphere at 12 and 14 respectively. Earth, after being united together against the buggers, is becoming restless and the pacts and treaties that once held strong in the face of a greater enemy are now being challenged as self-interest takes hold again. Peter is determined to take advantage of this restlessness to gain himself the power and influence he craves and Valentine is just as eager for an opportunity to practice the genius she is rarely given the space to demonstrate at her age.

Valentine and Ender are reunited earth-side when Graff brings Valentine to him in order to convince a disillusioned Ender to continue his training which is now taking him to Command School. Despite the time, distance, and change between them, Valentine is the only person on the planet that Ender truly loves and despite the awkwardness of their meeting, her presence alone convinces him to go back to the fight if only so that she might not die at the hands of the buggers.

At the Command School Ender is trained by Mazer Rackham himself, the commander who previously led humanity to its narrow victory against the buggers. Ender trains endlessly on a simulator against the Rackham until one day it is subbed out for a newer more complex machine. On this new machine all of his old friends are with him, via headset, training together with a fleet of ships at their control. The seemingly endless training pushes them to their breaking points until finally Ender is able to defeat the game by piloting a single ship on a suicide mission to destroy the enemies planet. Only he discovers that it was never a game. That through the simulator Ender has won the invasion, and has effectively wiped out the Buggers in the process.

Meanwhile in the wake of this victory, was has broken out on world war has broken out on Earth. As Ender copes with the knowledge of his true actions, his siblings successfully navigate a peace treaty and come to an understanding that sees Peter finally rise to power and Valentine able to reunite with Ender. The caveat is that because of the influence he now wields as Earth’s savior, Ender is too powerful, and in order to save him from the clutches of their brother, Valentine makes it so that Ender will never return to the planet he has saved and together they travel to colonize the now empty worlds that the Buggers have left behind.

This novel while filled with adolescent characters, is harder to track as adolescent literature because the children in it are so different from what their “average” peers look like. To that end, I would like to look at the effect of “genius” on the development of the protagonists. We have discussed the different ways that adolescent literature is categorized based on development but I would like to explore what that development means when the characters within the novels are already intellectually adults, to study whether they still qualify as adolescents, and what that means for the definition of the term and the genre. In doing that, I would try to focus on the major themes present in the novel, to see whether they support or contradict the idea of this book being adolescent literature. Additionally, I would like to find comparisons and similarities between this book and others, to determine whether or not the concept of genius children is similar across titles and, if they are, how that advances or diminishes the argument for its genre placement.

Enders game has plenty of themes available that lend to the possibility to it being adolescent literature, such as the interaction and control of adults, the presence of institutions, of surveillance, of isolation, of death, and the mechanics of family. However within the novel, Ender’s youth (and Peters and Valentines) tends to be in years alone and if he is forced to mature it occurs so rapidly that it may not even occur while we are present with him in the novel, which would mean sometime between the ages of 0-6 he effectively becomes an adult. There are moments of uncertainty and fear within the novel that could be that of a child, however there is nothing immature about his fears, they are of such a scope that it is hard to imagine that an adult would not feel the same emotions. It is also arguable that all people mature and grow whatever their intellectual level, and if that is true then perhaps the growth of Ender and his genius brethren should not be measured in the ways that we view adolescence currently, but on a scale all its own. I have not at this point done enough research to confidently make an argument either way, so I am simply presenting it here as an argument and study to be made.