Ender's Game is an Understated Story of Uncertainty

edit: I thought that breaking bad was awesome but reading it being reduced as "drama" make me realize it was mainly drama in specific setting :(

I think it's hard to fully appreciate Ender's Game as an first-time adult reader.

The books in the Ender's Shadow series came much later and are more in the same vein as Ender's Game.

Thanks.

That is more rare, and I think it's one reason for Ender's Game's enduring appeal to young readers.

I guess what I mean is that in popular culture generally, kids are usually foils, adorably precocious, MacGuffins, or otherwise one-dimensional. They are usually defined by their relationships with adults and their problems are usually solved by an adult, a deus ex machina, or by magic.

Ender's Game does a great job of portraying a wide range of behaviors, character traits, and emotions within a cast of intelligent primary-school-aged kids.

In fact, we consistently have had guidance from Church leaders about being welcoming and kind to everyone, and even some rather pointed reminders about following that guidance in regards to LGBT. You'd be hard pressed to find statistics, especially any that had a representative poll outside of Utah.

Of course, he is crazy in lots of other ways - read any of his political articles. He seems to revel in stating things in insensitive ways, and then likes to play the martyr afterwards.

Nonetheless, his fiction is almost always excellent, so I avidly read him.

They are trying to create a narrative about Card's morality using his books to ferret out his true colors. I'm not interested in that. Card is a jerk, fine. I get that. I agree even. I don't particularly care. I am more interested in evaluating his books and characters on their own merits. Despite being an insufferable heel in real life, I think Card has a very good grasp of humanity and he is able to write characters and situations that are true to life in many ways. In particular, I think Ender's Game illustrates many characters whose morality and motivations are complex in many of the same ways that real people are complex. Ender and company struggle with exaggerated versions of the same problems we struggle with. I am not interested in the book as primary source for moral teaching, and I do not think it was intended to be read that way. Kessel and Radford seem determined, however, to draw a host of moral conclusions about Card and his worldview from the book. I don't see the value in this.

Card is a good storyteller, and in staying true to the story I think it forces Card to distance his own morals from that of his characters. Specifically, there are things Card himself has said about Ender and other characters in the book that I do not think are true. Kessel points out some of these inconsistencies between the text of Ender's game and what Card has said about them later, but in his article Kessel is guilty of the same thing: re-imaging the text and Ender himself in such a way that is convenient to his argument, not as he was written (as I pointed out in brief with my previous comment).

These authors have put a good deal of thought into their works, and while I feel like I understand the essence of their arguments, I am not going to be able to construct a fair treatment of their arguments without a similar investment of time on my side to articulate my thoughts with the same depth and specificity as theirs. I will try to address them in brief, but my points here will not be as fleshed as theirs because I do not have that kind of time presently.

It is also hard to pull out Kessel's central point from the article, because he covers a lot of ground. A more fair treatment would be to try identify the main thoughts in the article, organize them into a cogent argument and address each in turn, but again I am not going to invest that kind of time into this. This is the kind of work that is more profitable in a discussion format.

At the beginning of the article Kessel states his goal:

----

The purpose of this paper is to examine the methods Card uses to construct this story of a guiltless genocide, to point out some contradictions inherent in this scenario, and to raise questions about the intention-based morality advocated by Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead.

----

You will notice he says the paper is to examine and question. From the tone of the article the author has strong conclusions he has drawn, or at least a point he is trying to make, but he never really articulates his conclusions. It is hard to find a place where Kessel states simply what he is arguing. The first section of the essay is predominantly filled with examples of how Card writes Ender in a very sympathetic light as contrasted with his adversaries. As best I can tell, Kessel is trying to establish that Card is using Ender as the poster-boy or prime example of the "intention-based morality" Card advocates. I do not think Kessel is really questioning Ender's character but rather he is questioning why Card spent so much time creating the situations and motivations that establish Ender as an guiltless killer.

As I touched on briefly in the previous comment, I do not agree with Kessel's treatment of the material. Kessel seems willing to bend the narrative of the book in order to push his point about Card's motivations. There is no doubt that Card is writing Ender as a sympathetic character. But the story of Ender is not the story of a cruel, fundamentally violent person who gets off scot-free over and over again because of good intentions. The story of Ender is the story of a person with very dangerous potential who is repeatedly backed into a corner where they are forced to realize their violent ability. To some extent this is all of us. Ender is violent despite his best intentions. He is innocent because his options were reduced to the point where kill or be killed where the only rational choices.

Kessel seems bent on placing the blame on Ender because Ender was the one who killed, but Ender killed when he had no choice. The blame belongs with those who forced him into situations where he had to kill, who deceived him into treating life-and-death decisions as a game (the Xenocide itself). In the final battle Ender only chooses the course he does because it is a game with no real consequences.

Kessel is astonished that Card sees Ender as the victim in so many situations:

----

By “The person being subjected to the torture,” Card is not referring here to Stilson, Bonzo, or the buggers, who may well be sacrificed, but whose sacrifices are certainly not “voluntary.” Their deaths are not the voluntary sacrifices that draw Card’s concern. [...] All the force of such passages is on the price paid by the destroyer, not on the price paid by the destroyed.

----

The implication is that Stilson, Bonzo, and the buggers are the victims, and not Ender. Ender is the destroyer according to Kessel. But let's look at these situations:

Stilson bullies Ender relentlessly. Ender has an understandable fear of ongoing and serious injury from Stilson once the monitor is removed. He waits for authority to act. Ender does not take matters into his own hands until it is obvious that no one else is going to step in and help him. When he does take action it is decisive. He does not intend to kill Stilson but unknowingly he does. Who's responsibility is this? Ender is too young to understand that he has killed Stilson. The responsibility lies with the teachers and Graff who orchestrated this situation and allowed it to progress to the point that it did. In my opinion both Stilson and Ender are victims here. This is an exaggeration of real life. How many stories have you read about kids who were bullied, the administration turned a blind eye until a fight broke out and then suspended the kid for fighting back?

Bonzo is an even more clear case. How can you argue that Bonzo is the victim in any sense? Ender triumphs, but he is obviously a victim here. Blame rests squarely on Bonzo's own shoulders, and again on the shoulders of the teachers who were purposefully negligent.

With the buggers, they attacked first. It is entirely reasonable for humanity to defend itself. This war was fundamentally one of misunderstanding, with humanity and the buggers both seeing the other as savage, but the buggers made the first aggressive move. The buggers ultimately realized their mistake, but were unable to communicate their desire for peace to the humans. I would argue that without knowing their minds the humans were justified in adopting a "kill them before they kill us" approach. They already had first hand proof of the buggers' deadly intent. You could argue this still does not justify xenocide, and I would agree, but one could argue convincingly that the humans are justified. Ender is removed even from this because he did not know they were attacking the buggers. He did not know his training was actually the real war. Ender took the actions he did thinking it was not real. We do this all the time when we play video games. We purposefully kill people, sometimes innocent people. Sometimes we purposefully do things we would say is evil in a video game because we know it is not real. We would never do those in real life. Ender never intended to commit xenocide.

Like I said, I don't think Kessel is really intending to attack Ender's morality. That's not really a tenable position because Card wrote the world he lives in. Card as the author can (and has) written it in such a way that Ender can not reasonably be held responsible for the outcomes of his actions. I think Kessel (and Radford) are more concerned with why Card wrote such a story, but they contort the story itself to make their point.

I really should take the time to go through in more depth, because there is so much in Kessel's article that I have some comment on (some I agree with). It is hard in a summary like this to avoid conflating them. But in essence, Kessel rejects the morality of Ender in context because he wants to make a point about Card's morality. Ultimately I think he and Radford are arguing that the book offers a false view of morality and advances a harmful view of innocence, vindicating a cruel murderer. I reject that interpretation of the books, asserting that many of their comments are not true with respect to the actual text of the book. I believe the book paints an accurate portrayal of many human motivations, and I assert that Ender within the context of his circumstances--which I admit are fictional--made moral choices and was justified in his actions. Particularly, I would argue that you have to ignore major plot points in the book and twist the characters beyond recognition to make the comparison between Ender and Hitler, or the buggers and the Jews.