How Will Reading Ender's Game Benefit Today's Teenager?
Submitted by NCTE
My worries about the damage it does a book to be required reading have long
since been dispelled. Unlike Scarlet Letter, which was never a good book, merely
"edgy" and anti-establishment in a long-gone era, Ender's Game seems not to lose
much from the onus of being required reading.
One thing adolescent readers gain is that the book does not lend itself to the
standard toolset of literary analysis. Find the metaphors and the symbols and what
do you have? A few obvious and uninteresting observations, because this book is
not about how cleverly the writer has encoded his "meaning." Indeed, few things
are more frustrating than the endless letters from high school students pleading
with me to tell them the theme of Ender's Game. I'm not distressed by their asking
- it's easy enough to tell them "do your own work, please, and good luck." What
distresses me is that there are actually teachers of literature who think that that is a
useful and meaningful assignment, as if fiction were an essay in disguise, and
fiction that is NOT an essay in disguise were not worth a serious reading.
Ender's Game has primary value because the story gives the readers a hero's
memories. That is, they have had the experience of dealing with enormously
difficult moral issues and deciding to make personal sacrifices, take personal risks,
impose self-discipline, and submerge the self in the good of the group. These
memories take deep root in those readers for whom the story is especially
Beyond that, the book does provoke serious questioning. Under what
circumstances is war morally acceptable? Ender takes responsibility for
destroying the buggers, but is he "guilty" of a war crime? (A two-fold question:
given what the humans actually know, WAS there a war crime? And if there was,
was Ender guilty of it? Then why does it feel satisfying for him to take
responsibility for the consequences?)
There are also many other areas that can be explored which are derived, not from
the language, but from the what-happens-and-why of the story: Why is Ender a
good leader, and the other toon leaders not so good? What makes a friendship
good or bad? (Contrasting Ender and his friends with Bonzo and his friends and,
earlier, Stilson & friends and Bernard & friends.) What about the population laws,
and those who defy them? Are adults justified in deforming the lives of children
in order to win a war? Is it true that children would be better soldiers than adults
for the reasons given in the book? And so on.
These are not trivial questions. In many forms, they are precisely the questions
that young readers will face or already do face, not in the details, but in the general
moral drift. The book does not present one side as purely good, the other as purely
evil. Rather it shows the real world: That both sides can have powerful good
arguments and yet risk terrible costs; how do you make such decisions? Children
need to know.