In Orson Scott Well’s Ender’s Game, our protagonist, Ender Wiggin, is constantly showing us how he hates authority. He also loves the authority figures while simultaneously dreads becoming like them. This conflict reflects how men perceive their fathers. Many men dread becoming just like their father while, later in life, also appreciating how they were raised.
The young adult fiction story shows the inner angst many teenagers feel toward authority. Be it teachers, older boys or brothers, fathers, and later drill sergeants and higher brass. Teenagers also often feel like they’re an outsider. Much like Ender, who is labeled a ‘third’. In this universe, the government restricts family size to keep an overpopulated earth from breeding out of control. Valentine, Ender’s sister and the middle child in the Wiggin family, consoles Ender when he’s berated by other children at school and their oldest sibling Peter.
On one hand, Ender is coddled by authority throughout this text. He’s constantly reminded that he’s a genius strategist; the savior of the human race against the ‘buggers’. The training games are meant to sculpt the boy into some military savant. Yet, Ender is also humiliated throughout his military rearing. Pestered by the other kids in the training facility and thrust into impossible situations throughout by the faculty.
This humiliation and constant challenging is meant to represent “the firm hand of the father”, in a sense. “Do as you’re told, don’t ask why. You’ll thank me later.” And, indeed, the story plays out exactly like that. Ender goes through the motions; plays their games and defeats them. He’s sculpted into the perfect commander. Ender has only the most diluted sense of dissonance with his authority figures.
In fact, it isn’t until the end of the trials that it’s revealed to him that he was being lied to. That the ships he was commanding, the games he was playing, was real life. The ships were off in a distant solar system. The people on those ships were fighting a real war. And the deaths were that of real people and real enemies.
Ender accepts this lie by the resolution of the book rather easily. He doesn’t see it as a betrayal, even though it’s later revealed that the buggers weren’t even trying to continue the war. After the buggers were initially defeated, they retreated to their home world. Once the entire species were dead, Ender has some ethereal conversation that reveals the insidiousness of the government that raised the boy on half-truths.
By the end of the novel, we’re shown why we hate our fathers. But for Ender, he’s only slightly troubled by this revolution. The chosen one rises to occasion. But let’s be honest; we aren’t the chosen one. That lie we’re being fed isn’t for our benefit. Which is one of the biggest problems with this book. We’re meant to swallow that pill and accept our path which was drawn out by authority. Just accept that it will all work out in the end.
