Ender's Game is morally repugnant

[radhardened]

As I hear friends and acquaintances express eagerness to see the Ender's Game film that will be released this fall, I have a hard time responding. I want to ask, have you read the book? After you were fifteen years old? And you enjoyed it? I can't understand how it won the awards it did. It's not just poorly written, it's repugnant. John Kessel articulates why in his essay Creating the Innocent Killer:
Ender's Game, Intention, and Morality. An excerpt:

We see the effects of displaced, righteous rage everywhere around us, written in violence and justified as moral action, even compassion. Ender gets to strike out at his enemies and still remain morally clean. Nothing is his fault. Stilson already lies defeated on the ground, yet Ender can kick him in the face until he dies, and still remain the good guy. Ender can drive bone fragments into Bonzo’s brain and then kick his dying body in the crotch, yet the entire focus is on Ender’s suffering. For an adolescent ridden with rage and self-pity, who feels himself abused (and what adolescent doesn’t?), what’s not to like about this scenario? So we all want to be Ender. As Elaine Radford has said, “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.”

But that’s a lie. No one is that special; no one is that innocent. If I felt that Card’s fiction truly understood this, then I would not have written this essay.

Comments

[drwho]

Ender was a good guy? I thought he was a prime example of the kind of person not to let oneself turn into.