Intro: Intergenerational trauma is a harmful force that impacts individuals as well as entire communities and is passed on via lived events or memories. Pete, an Indigenous guy from a damaged household, demonstrates its impacts in The Outside Circle. Pete was born into a life of violence, drunkenness, and poverty, and his mother is unable to offer the attention he requires, so he turns to the streets and gangs for love and acceptance. Pete's father was a victim of the residential school system, which is a sort of cultural genocide, and his suffering was passed on to him.
Ender doesn’t like hurting people much at the beginning but towards the end he becomes a soldier and a killer. Ender leaned his head against the wall of the corridor and cried until the bus came. I am just like Peter. Take my monitor away, and I am just like Peter. This quote shows that Ender doesn’t want to turn out violent like his older brother, but the government forced him to.
Kessel says that this is all used to by Card to make the reader sympathize for Ender. This allows him to be portrayed as a killer who commits mass genocide, yet is innocent because he has good motives. Kessel goes on to
Ender knows what has to be done in order to prevent further, possibly fatal, attacks and demonstrates that he is willing to attack on the helpless to do so. (add more?) good Chapter 2. “It was not a question of winning… here in their flat, the game would start mean, and the bugger couldn’t just go empty and quit the way buggers did in the real wars. The bugger
The novel Enders Game by Orson Scott Card is compelling with its characterizations and futurist plot line. Written in 1985, the story shows a boy, only 6 years of age named Ender and his journey through battle school with his companions and altercations with enemies to defeat the supposed “threat” of the buggers: alien invaders. A common practice by the characters in the novel is lying and deceiving to gain power; oddly however, the lies and deceit are more useful than telling the truth. Card shows this theme through the motif of power and how those above Ender such as Graff, Valentine and Mazer Rackham lied to him to help Ender gain power.
John Kessel’s essay, Creating the Innocent Killer, is a character study of Andrew ‘Ender’ Wiggin, from Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. The essay provides an interesting look into who Ender actually is underneath all of Card’s world manipulation, and the message that Card was trying to send through Ender’s existence in the story. Essentially, the message that Kessel sees in the novel is that ‘actions should be judged based on intentions, rather than results,’ which is a belief that is generally be untrue. The theory that this message was intentionally being portrayed in Ender’s journey is backed up by large amounts of evidence, both from the book, and from Card himself. This isn’t all too hard to prove.
This is also when Ender realizes that the buggers could have been friendly and peaceful. One important theme in this book is the isolation of Ender. Ender must be
In Orson Scott Card’s book Ender’s Game, Ender is continually set up against impossible odds by the International Fleet, which is part of a plan to train Ender to fight in the Third Invasion and end the bugger wars forever. Ender’s trials are portrayed more convincingly in the book, as the book shows him struggling with the expectations placed upon him more so than in the movie. An important theme in Ender’s Game is that Ender is continually kept in the dark about the events happening around him. This theme is prevalent throughout the book, and sets the stage for the book’s climax, the Third Invasion.
Ender Wiggin is the third and final Wiggin child, only six-years-old at the beginning of the novel (and only eleven at the end of it). He is incredibly gifted, but extremely conflicted, and he represents the ego in this metaphor. “The ego develops from perceiving instincts to controlling them, from obeying instincts to inhibiting them” (Freud 32). The ego, in psychology, serves to bring the id’s desires into the physical world. In the context of personification, the ego is a combination of the id and the super-ego, attempting to maintain the values of each in a way that is most conducive to living in society, a balance of pleasure-seeking, morality, and reality.
On Earth there was a bully named, Stilson. Ender found himself getting physically abused by him daily and when he finally got his opportunity, he made sure he was never bullied again. In battle school, there was a commander named, Bonzo that threatened to kill him; then, in the same scenario Ender decided to make sure that he would win the war and erase all future battles. In argument with Major Anderson, Graff states, “Ender’s not a killer. He just wins--thoroughly” (226).
The first major event that showed Ender enduring some troubles was when he woke up in the middle of the night and found that “there was blood” on his bed, and he had been “gnawing on his own fist” (285) in the middle of the night, in his sleep. This revealed to the reader that the strong and powerful Ender might be beginning to crack and show a
"…she squeezed his knee…where he had always been most ticklish. But almost at the same moment, he caught her wrist in his hand. His grip was very strong, even though his hands were smaller than hers and his own arms were slender and tight. For a moment he looked dangerous; then he relaxed." () Unknowingly Ender has surrendered to the virtuous boy he once was in exchange for the arduous adolescent he is now, confirming what the Battle School destined him to become.
Calculating Judgments For someone so young, Ender is exceptionally calculating. In almost the very beginning of the novel, the author shows Ender being bullied by Stilson and his gang. Ender realizes that he must thoroughly beat Stilson so the rest of the gang wouldn’t pick on Ender ever
Without the bugger war, Ender would not have been born, and he realizes this fact. Interestingly enough, the reader never directly see’s the war against the buggers. The only war ever seen directly is the other war that Ender fights every day – the war against the teachers games, against the other kids, against his fear of becoming his brother, against the instinct that drives Ender to hurt other people. Ender’s entire life is made up of these little battles. Ender finds his identity in the battles that he fights and the challenges that he over comes.
Passion & Aggression Ender once said, “To learn how to truly fight in war, I must show passion and aggression.” During the story of the Ender’s Game, Ender feels like he’s stuck in between love and war. As the story of Ender’s journey goes on, he’s known to fight with so much aggression which makes him feel bad because he makes people not want to ever fight him again. In several parts of the story, Ender feels terrible after showing his aggression to someone because of his passionate side.
