Ender's Game

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1985

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Chapters 13-15

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Self-Sacrifice for the Greater Good

Throughout the book, characters, especially Ender and Graff, must make personal sacrifices for humanity’s survival—and many of those choices impact the people they know and love. First, Ender sacrifices companionship with his family and Battle School students. Though Ender consents to Battle School and plays the adults’ game, he doesn’t necessarily choose this sacrifice for himself. Graff coordinates Ender’s isolation to prepare him for the commander position: “His isolation can’t be broken. He can never come to believe that anybody will ever help him out, ever. If he once thinks there’s an easy way out, he’s wrecked. [...] He can have friends. It’s parents he can’t have” (28). However, the measures Graff takes deprives Ender of opportunities to sustain any meaningful connections. Because he must constantly strive for perfection, he takes every moment of training seriously, which means he can’t relax and joke with his friends; even when he wants to, he doesn’t know how. For example, after his friends have an amiable moment together in front of him, Ender describes, “They apologized again. Back to business. Back to respect. […] How could they think I was part of it? Did I laugh? Did I join in? Just stood there, watching, like a teacher” (99). Inwardly, Ender tries clinging to those few precious connections—his love for Valentine, his sacred bond with Alai—but his duty stifles both of those. Graff uses Valentine to manipulate Ender, and he severs Ender’s relationship with Alai by promoting Ender. Graff hits the final nail in the coffin when he abandons Ender to Bonzo’s scheme, forcing him to accept that nobody will ever come to his rescue. Graff’s strategy effectively guides Ender to winning the bugger war, but Ender’s estrangement results in psychological, relational, and (in Command School) physical trauma that is likely to reverberate throughout his life.

Ender also sacrifices his own morals as he accepts greater responsibility. Though Ender hates violence, he uses it to save his own life and the war. When handling bullies, Ender knows the only “way to forestall vengeance” long-term is to eliminate the enemy altogether (5). He thinks, “I have to win this now, and for all time, or I’ll fight it every day and it’ll get worse and worse” (5). Ender cries little in the novel, but one common reason is because he deeply regrets having to hurt people, even if they’re bullies and leave him no choice. This change also affects how Ender’s loved ones perceive him; notably, Valentine begins fearing him like she and Ender used to fear Peter. She describes him as a “cold-eyed, dark-skinned manling who kills wasps with his fingers” (166), which is reminiscent of Peter’s squirrel torture. Ultimately, becoming who the world needs transforms Ender into someone he hates, but he resolutely continues down that path for the greater good.

Finally, Graff also makes personal sacrifices to achieve his daunting task: finding and training the person who can save humanity. He cares about his students, but he doesn’t let their individual comforts impede their most important purpose. Graff explains to Ender,

I’ll put it bluntly. Human beings are free except when humanity needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe humanity needs me—to find out what you’re good for. We might both do despicable things, Ender, but if humankind survives, then we were good tools (26).

To Graff, Ender primarily serves as a weapon. Graff rightly assumes that such a philosophy would receive major backlash back from Earth, but he is ready to accept responsibility for the actions he takes to win the war. Unfortunately, Graff’s sacrifice doesn’t lessen the weight of Ender’s guilt, which Ender must also bear for the remainder of his life.

Understanding the Enemy

The Wiggin siblings have a particular knack for understanding people (specifically, sensing a core attribute or belief and anticipating how they will act on it) and using that knowledge to their advantage. Though Ender and Valentine distance themselves from Peter, their intellectual gifts are more similar to his than different. Valentine describes how “[Peter] could always see what other people hated most about themselves, and bully them, while Val could always see what other people liked best about themselves, and flatter them” (91). This intuition makes Peter and Valentine successful politicians, but in Battle School it makes Ender undefeatable. Ender anticipates what strategies his opposing armies will employ, and he uses targeted rhetoric toward bullies to give himself the advantage. The reality that Ender must necessarily understand his enemy paired with his good nature results in him loving those he destroys. For example, Ender recognizes that even though Bonzo brings a gang to corner him, Bonzo’s objective would never negate his Spanish honor code. Consequently, Bonzo agrees to a one-on-one fight, significantly increasing Ender’s odds. Afterward, Ender contemplates how his own morals stand next to Bonzo’s: “His sense of honor saved my life. ‘I didn’t fight with honor. […] I fought to win’” (156). Far from ridiculing Bonzo’s fatal mistake, Ender respects his adherence to a moral code—a trait Ender desires for himself.

After Battle School, Ender’s enemy becomes more threatening and mysterious. Unlike Ender’s other opponents, the buggers are difficult to understand from the limited footage and genetic information humanity has. Ender first begins empathizing with the buggers in his dreams: “He had been dreaming that buggers were vivisecting him. Only instead of cutting open his body, they were cutting up his memories and displaying them like holographs and trying to make sense of them” (194). Since Ender doesn’t understand how they think, he only knows to empathize with the feeling of exposure before the enemy. Ender feels uncomfortable with his enemy analyzing his history, evaluating all his victories and regrets. As Ender reciprocates this “vivisecting” of the buggers, this mindset softens his heart toward them, making him more receptive of the hive queen’s pleas later in the book. After the war, guilt overwhelms Ender, but ironically the world governments and media only argue over Stilson and Bonzo’s deaths, and “no one thinks to call [the buggers’ genocide] a crime” (216). Few people blame Ender for even the two human deaths. However, as an act of atonement, he becomes a colonist to learn more about the buggers. After Ender’s conversation with the hive queen, sharing their story becomes his vocation. He initiates the Speaker of the Dead tradition, in which someone steps forward at funerals to “say what the dead one would have said, but with full candor, hiding no faults and pretending no virtues” (225). Ender doesn’t ignore his enemy’s dark side to understand them or even to love them. Though the new tradition’s origins remain mysterious to most who practice it, Ender’s full legacy now transcends his military victories; the philosophy of Ender’s mind and heart reverberate through a world he has long left.

Trickery, Manipulation, and Choice

From the moment a doctor installed a monitor in Ender’s neck, he has played a piece in someone else’s game, whether he is conscious of it or not. In fact, Ender’s training is a web of games, in which winning one only leads to another, and he must conquer one game entirely before advancing. Naturally, Ender first assumes his enemies are the other players he must best to achieve top rankings; he devotes his energy toward victory and perfection. However, Dink gives Ender a new perspective on Battle School systems and politics:

These other armies, they aren’t the enemy. It’s the teachers, they’re the enemy. They get us to fight each other, to hate each other. The game is everything. Win win win. It amounts to nothing. We kill ourselves, go crazy trying to beat each other, and all the time the old bastards are watching us, discovering our weak points, deciding whether we’re good enough or not (77).

Dink’s insight makes Ender reevaluate Battle School and acknowledge a new enemy: the teachers. Eventually, isolation and the adults’ disloyalty beget apathy, and he slowly gives up the game: “[Ender] had only one memory that was safe, one good thing, and those bastards had plowed it into him with the rest of the manure—and so he was finished, he wasn’t going to play” (107). Despite Ender’s convictions, he can’t help but keep playing the game—like Dink, he genuinely loves it—though this time, he’s determined to play by his own rules. However, he doesn’t realize breaking the rules doesn’t confound the adults; rather, it exceeds their expectations, demonstrated by Ender’s rapid promotion after disregarding traditional rules to win a battle against two armies. At this point, Ender wants nothing more to do with games; Graff takes him on a three-month landside leave, where Ender resists returning to space and playing Graff’s game.

Ender only consents to Command School when Valentine reminds him the bugger threat is larger than Graff’s Battle School games. He decides that, if he plays, he will do so by his own choosing rather than the adults’ trickery. He keeps careful watch for manipulation games: “Ender didn’t like games where the rules could be anything and the objective was known to [the game organizers] alone. So he wouldn’t play” (183). However, Graff hasn’t used all his cards; he and Mazer must trick Ender into thinking his training is something different from what it is. They don’t want Ender’s judgment clouded by real battle deaths and the paralyzing weight of all humanity’s survival. Mazer’s teaching strategy ensures Ender only views him as an enemy. If Ender primarily focuses his frustration on Mazer rather than humanity’s fate, he can perform more objectively in battle. Mazer successfully tricks Ender into playing a game he doesn’t know he’s playing, and Ender unwittingly annihilates an entire species.

After the war, Ender is sick with guilt and feels that, more than anyone, he might be the true antagonist—the true enemy. Outside of a restrictive human narrative, the buggers’ sapience adds complexity to how readers perceive the story altogether. Finally, Ender learns the key to any game isn’t just knowing how to break the rules but also how to choose the right game. As Valentine explains, “Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given to you by good people, by people who love you” (218). He leaves behind the people who used him—the military and government—to start a new life on a distant colony and learn more about the buggers. When Ender makes his own agreement with the bugger queen, he starts playing by the rules of a different game—one that he chooses independently, and one that doesn’t involve conquest and destruction but rather life and peace.