Ender's Game Response Part 3

“Ender’s Game”, by Orson Scott Card, is a really confusing book to read. The beginning was interesting, whereas the middle gets boring and then toward the end, it gets interesting. This whole book somewhat revolves around a typical school life of bullies and groups. Ender suffered being bullied and isolated due to his intelligence surpassing boys who are older than him. They were all sent to the battle school, ‘kidnapped’ from their families, in order to train and compete to be a future commander or hero. With everyone competing, everyone would hate the fact that there is someone younger than them who are more brilliant. So out of jealousy, the guys in the battle school will gang up in groups and attack him or harass him. Throughout the book, it only explained how Ender slowly understands technologies and learning new techniques. This is weird because only toward the end, that the book finally showed actions and showed a real battle which ended with a couple of pages.

My group discussed how most of the book drags on about Ender’s training and skimmed through his battle. One of my group members suggested that it was to help the readers understand the technologies because this story is set into the future. The things discussed in the book would be too confusing for us to understand if the author skims through battle school and just talked about Ender’s battle and the adventure afterward. We also discuss about how this book is somewhat amazing because the children in this story acted so mature that we had to constantly remind ourselves that the protagonist is an eleven year old boy. Overall, my group’s discussion revealed some things that I had never considered before such as revolving around a typical school life. It was interesting and the topics were things that I easily overlooked in this book.

            We also discuss about whether the buggers forgave humans or wants the humans to forgive them. Part of what I didn’t really mention in the discussion is that Ender is trying to help the buggers repopulate because he wanted to atone for his sins of killing an entire species.  The fact that he is somewhat like Peter still haunts him; he didn’t want to be a killer, didn’t want to be the person that he feared the most but he killed the buggers. He was afraid of becoming more vicious than Peter so he probably helped the buggers to compensate for what he had done to their species.