Several months ago, I read this article John Kessell essay on Orson Scott Card's classic Ender's Game. I'm not sure what compelled me to read the article when I had not yet read the book, but like Tom Townsend I sometimes appreciate critiques of works more than the works themselves because they give you two competing (or concurring) ideas whereas the original work usually takes considerably longer to give you one. I similarly enjoy reading Cliff Notes of works that I do not have any obligation to read or understand.

But that's neither here nor there. In this case, I finally did get around to consuming the book itself and it was a strange thing to be entering something as comprehensive looking through the prysm of someone's ideas. It's not surprising, though, that the elements discussed in the essay were the ones I honed in most closely on when consuming the original work.

Kessell's main point is thus:

In relating Ender Wiggin’s childhood and training in Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card presents a harrowing tale of abuse. Ender’s parents and older brother, the officers running the battle school and the other children being trained there, either ignore the abuse of Ender or participate in it.

Through this abusive training Ender becomes expert at wielding violence against his enemies, and this ability ultimately makes him the savior of the human race. The novel repeatedly tells us that Ender is morally spotless; though he ultimately takes on guilt for the extermination of the alien buggers, his assuming this guilt is a gratuitous act. He is presented as a scapegoat for the acts of others. We are given to believe that the destruction Ender causes is not a result of his intentions; only the sacrifice he makes for others is.

While combing the material for examples in agreement or opposition to Kessell's thesis, I ran across a couple interesting parallels. First to Harry Potter, which I had consumed just before. The similarities between Potter and Ender are common to youth-oriented works: outcast child thrust into extraordinary circumstances. The other connection, which came considerably later, was to Neon Genesis Evangelion, the monumental (and monumentally warped) anime work of Haddeaki Anno.

One of the main elements of Kessell's essay about the Ender whose Game the book is about, and the most notable (and notorious) aspect of Neon Genesis Evangelion's lead Shinji Ikari is his reluctance to do... well... much of anything, really. There is a photoshopped picture out there for the Neon Genesis Evangelion video game where the buttons, instead of having typical markers like "punch" or "kick", all have the same command: whine.

I thought of the whine buttons pretty frequently throughout Ender's Game. Ender's resentment was much more justified than Shinji's, and I understood why Ender was often reluctant to do those things that he was reluctant to do, but throughout the entire novel one never got a sense of what Ender really wanted to do. In that vein, the characterization of his psychotic brother was considerably more deep.

Of course, that too is a sort of lesson for adolescence -- or at least adolescence as I experienced it a decade ago and many seem to be experiencing it today. There are surely many ambitious exceptions, but learning is not generally high on the agenda of young people. Neither, for that matter, is earning. Spending is usually a goal, but most of the spending seems to be geared towards temporary amusement (movies, video games, or books) or otherwise temporary things (seasonal fashion).

There is a frequent stereotype in film, among other entertainment media, of a parent trying to get through to his kid that won't take the earphones out of his ears. It is generally a quite lazy metaphor for the child living in his own world, but it is used so frequently in entertainment because it represents something so frequent in reality: the desire for isolation.

As if to make this post's descent in to geekdom complete, the last example is a comic book involving an older character: Kevin Matchstick of the Mage serials. The only real connection is the reluctance of the hero to do what is asked of him and his inability to articulate a preferred course of action, but I bring it up to cite a quote from Mirth, his wizardous sensei: "What makes you think you are so worthy of this isolation that you so crave?"

Ender Wiggins was quite a talented kid and did amazingly well with the tasks put before him, but with the exception of the relationship that he had with his sister Valentine his talents were remarkably wasted otherwise. Were he not being pushed so hard by Corporal Graff, what would he have done with all of these extraordinary skills? Without the direction that Graff laid out for him, where would Ender have gone? What would he have done to deserve the right to be left to do his own thing?

The best answer provided by the book was that absent rising to the call of duty, he would have been able to live a normal childhood. This is presented by some, inside the book and out, as some notable achievement. Normality. The childhood that our society goes to such lengths to preserve and protect and freeze in amber. Innocence as not a condition one is in but a goal to be achieved. Instead of encouraging and rewarding excellence, we lament the costs it incurs.

This is not so much a criticism of Orson Scott Card and his premier novel as I believe Card himself would agree with a lot of what I have to say. It does seem, however, that in the same way that Archie Bunker was often found to be funny for all the wrong reasons, I wonder if Ender Wiggins is found to be right for all the wrong reasons by many of the book's admirers. I wonder if people relate to him not because of the universality of certain aspects of his condition, but because they too see their talents as a metaphorical burden in their lives in the same ways that they deliberately (on the part of Graff and others) become a burden on his life in the novel.