Ender’s Zero-Sum Game

Psychoanalyzing Andrew Wiggin

Piece by Carl Jung, used in The Red Book.

Thanks to some recommended reading from one of my sisters, I’ve come to read Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game in an entirely different light. In “Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender’s Game, Intention, and Morality,” John Kessel offers a fascinating reading of the moral ambivalence, and even potential immortality, of Card’s novel.

In Andrew “Ender” Wiggin, Kessel sees the construction of an ostensibly “innocent killer” merely; in other words, that Ender, though guilty of tremendous atrocities by the novel’s end, is written off as simply a product of his circumstances and thus justified rather than morally culpable. At the end of his piece, Kessel quotes Elaine Radford: “We would all like to believe that our suffering has made us special — especially if it gives us a righteous reason to destroy our enemies.” Kessel then adds, by way of conclusion, “But that’s a lie. No one is that special; no one is that innocent.” Similar to Radford — who, in 1987, wrote an essay comparing Ender Wiggin to Adolf Hitler (and to which Card wrote a rebuttal) — Kessel is less than impressed with Ender’s Game. After his own damning character analysis of Ender, Kessel concludes, “If I felt that Card’s fiction truly understood this, then I would not have written this essay.”