Ender's Game Essay

Words: 695
Pages: 3

Books always have a meaning to them. Some hidden message in it makes the reader learn a lesson. Something that’ll change who they are and how they see the world. Orson Scott Card does this constantly throughout his novel “Ender’s Game.” It teaches readers many lessons and takeaways like “Management by manipulation is weak management” for instance. The renowned author and college professor, John Kessel, is terrified by one of the lessons in Ender’s Game, up to the point where he wrote a whole essay criticizing it. In 2003, John Kessel wrote the essay “Creating the Innocent Killer,” in which he accuses Orson Scott Card of creating “a harrowing tale of abuse.” A story where Card is attempting to draw sympathy to only the main character and present …show more content…
Kessel “drives this point home” in an extreme way throughout his sections “The Innocent Killer.” and “Guiltless Genocide.” The most prudent example of this is when Kessel talks about how the officers were a big part of the reason Ender committed these levels of violence.“... the officers have valued Ender from the beginning precisely because when he resorts to violence, he does so to the extreme, completely eliminating any chance that his enemy may regroup and strike again. Ender destroyed Bonzo and Stilson’s ‘ability to make war’ by killing them.” Upon reading this on a surface level, it wouldn’t be uncommon that people wouldn’t understand how this piece of evidence supports the claim Kessel made. This evidence, however, does work because in this quote it is blatant that the officers are manipulating or doing something that will make the situation force Ender to use violence to some extreme despite the fact that he doesn’t want to. Many can relate to this because many children, especially those in middle school, mostly have the feeling that the ‘world is against them.’ That ‘people are forcing them to do what they don’t want to do.’ While Kessel does make excellent arguments, he also has many flaws in his