Summary Of Ender's Game

In Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, Ender Wiggin is chosen to attend a prestigious battle school for the best of the best children qualified to save the world. Through the years at this physically and mentally strenuous school, Ender joins an army, raises an undefeated one, and becomes a student at the command school. With all of his successful battles, Ender performs one last game in front of the foremost military officials where he unknowingly obliterates an entire species. Although this mass murder signifies the safety of Earth, it also points a finger directly at Ender for being a cold-hearted killer. Ender Wiggin is innocent of slaughtering an entire race because he simply thinks the final simulation is a game the entire time, he takes

Sometimes he has two games in one day or a game against two armies at the same time, but either way it is a game, and that is all Ender ever believes; he is just playing a game, and as soon as he wins, it will all be over and he can go back to his room. When it comes time to Ender’s last battle at the commander school, he is outnumbered in the simulation and is conflicted. There is only one way to win the game and that is to cheat. Ender is contemplating whether or not to stray from the rule book when the novel says, “If I break this rule, they’ll never let me be commander. It would be too dangerous. I’ll never have to play a game again. And that is victory” (Card, Ender’s 293). All Ender truly wants is to go home and be with his family. The idea of ending the silly games sounds like a win to him, and that is exactly what he does, although this does not make him a killer. The difference between Ender and a killer is discussed in John Kessel’s article regarding a blog arguement between Orson Scott Card and Elizabeth Radford when Kessel says, “...the passages insist that the difference between Hitler’s genocide and Ender’s is that Ender’s was an accident. Ender thought he was playing a simulation whereas Hitler knew the gas chambers were real” ( 5). It is as simple as that: Ender never knew. He is used as an innocent pawn by military officers and brainwashed into doing their dirty

Where the Fuhrer would have been content to kill everybody he thought might possibly one day represent a threat to his people, Ender does kill everybody -- and then proceeds to steal their heritage” (5). This remark is completely false, and in fact, Ender goes out of his way to preserve the heritage and culture of the Bugger race. While he is exploring for a settling area, Ender uncovers a fertilized pupa of a queen bugger. After seeing the memories of the buggers replay in his mind Ender ...reached into the cavity and took out the cocoon. It was astonishingly light, to hold all the hope and future of a great race within it. ‘I’ll carry you,’ said Ender,

‘I’ll go from world to world until I find a time and a place where you can come awake in safety. And I’ll tell your story to my people, so that perhaps in time