Enders Game Essay -- English Literature Essays

Ender's Game In our everyday life, we make decisions, decisions that may change the world we live in, if only slightly. However, each decision we make has an impact on our life and is therefore important. Each time we choose one thing over another, we draw from our previous knowledge to make the best choice we can. However, the ideas and thoughts that actually dictate how we make our choices are the morals that we base our life on. For some, these morals are simple and do not reflect what their life means to them, but for others, the morals that they live on are the foundation of their life. For those who have strong morals, those morals may be complex and hard to understand to others; for this reason, it is common for characters in a book to be simple and their actions to be taken only at face value. However, a few books are able to grasp the underlying meaning of certain actions and words, but none I have yet seen present the morals of characters and define so clearly the feeling and emotions o f people as Orson Scott Card has in his book, ENDER’S GAME. He creates his characters in ways that not only reveal the meanings of their lives, but he creates a story so gracefully interlaced within the feeling and emotions of his characters that the plot itself revolves around themes, ideas, and morals, not the other way around. He creates worlds with people so real that you remember them as real people; people from whom you take ideas and use to create a better life for yourself and others. Each character that Card creates has a unique personality. From the heartless people to the brilliant aliens, each person has their own way of doing things. His writing defines each character in ways such that you can feel how they feel and understand what they desire and need. What really makes this exceptional is that he not only creates the desires and needs of individual humans; he also creates a general feel of what humanity has evolved into. Furthermore, he has created new species that have needs and desires as a whole, thus creating a vast interconnecting universe that can not only be simply understood by the reader but can also be understood in a way that reveals how each character defines the meaning of life. Ender Wiggin, the main character, was born in a time when population restriction laws were in effect. The people of the time could only have two children.... ...is good because he is forgiving—he understands even those who hate him. This is his most important characteristic. He tries to understand everything, and is good at it. The reason he is so good in battle is because he wishes to understand even his enemy and he does, but as he puts it "In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves." To him this means that as soon as he delivers the killing blow, he loves his enemy and understands them, he hates himself for this. Another one of his morals is that he will try to undo what he has done. He accomplishes this by calling himself the Speaker For The Dead. To him this means that whomever he has killed he has understood, and the least he can do is share that understanding with others. In the case of the buggers, he killed them, understood them and loved them, and so he was able tell others that the buggers where really good, and through his writings he was able to redeem himself and bring to life those who he had killed.