Brianne Kane – Special to the Southern News
Earth has been invaded. The enemy is vicious and will not hesitate to kill you. The entire world is counting on you. You’re ten years old.
This is the setting for “Ender’s Game,” Orson Scott Card’s novel following the young Ender as he is manipulated, harmed, and trained by the IF or International Fleet. Think of the “IF” as the government, the military and “big brother” combined. The story begins with Ender being teased ruthlessly for being a “third”, meaning he was the third child born in his family even though Earth now has a “two child” policy. Ender, however, is gifted in some way, indistinguishable at school but his monitoring device (like a tracking chip in your skin) allows IF members to see/hear/think like Ender and because of this they choose him. They send Ender to Command School, leaving his sister Valentine to fend for herself against their oldest brother Peter, who is an apparent sociopath.
While Ender is at school his teachers purposefully pit him against other students, isolating him. The school was designed for children Ender’s age, to learn and grow together so once they’re soldiers together they already have a relationship; it is located in zero gravity deep space, like a floating army base. Here, Ender grows more isolated but also vastly more intelligent and intuitive than his counterparts. Soon we discover the older boys in the school are broken up into teams, each team having a leader – Ender, still much younger than the rest of the boys, is assigned team leader and given a special team of elite students. The IF have a detailed plan for Ender.
As the novel continues, we feel Ender’s pain – his isolation at school, his battling homesickness for his sister, and his growing contempt and suspicion for the IF. Throughout the novel there are interposed dialogue between unidentified IF officials, talking about and making allusions to the plans set up for Ender. Ender is going to save the world.
Ender goes through various struggles with his military training, one of the biggest being when he begins studying the enemy, “the buggers,” more closely. Also, when Ender is given a personal mentor, a former top military official who is praised for saving the Earth the first time “the buggers” invaded, he struggles with trust and the expression of general human emotion since all of his training at Command School has been how to kill his peers (with stun guns, just for practice!).
The novel begins to show us, by Ender beginning to understand himself, that Command School does not produce balanced, educated, military gentlemen but rather creates the shell of a man, filled only with the evil memories of the atrocities that occur at Command School. What could a bunch of ten year old boys do that is that bad? Well, when Ender beats the undefeated champion of their “game” (in which they fly in zero gravity and try to act like an army and defeat the other team) the leader of the opposing team, the one given the credit for the wins, plots and nearly succeeds in killing Ender by beating him to death. So, to say the least, these boys are vicious.
All in all, “Ender’s Game” is about much more than Ender’s personal struggles through Command School, and it’s not even about the parallels between “IF” and “big brother government.” “Ender’s Game” is about the social politics that come into play when people feel they are under attack. Throughout the novel the global political sphere is explained through the eyes of Valentine and Peter, Ender’s older siblings, because as they grow older (teenagers now) they develop alternate identities online and become political powerhouse bloggers. Their blog determines multiple international peace relations as well as treaties of war – and yet Peter was to become leader of the world because of this, and Valentine wants to help everyone.
The gendered relations in this novel are lacking authenticity to say the least, but the novel’s focus is clearly the male relationships in military barracks and the male identity as a soldier. Through Valentine and Peter however we see the entire world knee-jerking their way to peace and war, as well as intergalactic war with the “buggers.” Through Ender, as well as the anonymous IF officials, we see how the war and fear is portrayed in Command School: everything is war, and soldiers to feel fear.
