Enders Game Theme Analysis: Key Themes In Ender's Game

Ender’s Game Theme Analysis Essay For as long as America has existed, children have been treated as unintelligent and ignorant until adulthood. Adults think that their little minds can be easily manipulated and controlled. This is not the case. Kids have intelligent, beautiful, and compassionate thoughts and ideas. Still, adults have seemingly unchangeable needs to rule over children as their superiors, even though many kids are smarter and more logical than their elders. In Orson Scott Card’s, Ender’s Game, adults attempt to sway the mind of the child genius and protagonist, Ender Wiggin. One important theme in Ender’s Game is that adults will go to any measure to get children to do what they want, even if they ruin their childhoods along the way. One adult who manipulates Ender is Graff. Graff isolated Ender by saying he is more intelligent than other boys and putting him in army's that consist of older boys, which gives him no opportunity to make friends. Graff claims, “We won! That's all that matters” (297). Although he cared …show more content…
She was forced into manipulating him by adults, and only did it because she believed it was right. When she had the opportunity to speak with him she talked about how he needed to save the world and kill the buggers. Valentine also stated that, “we play by their rules long enough, and it becomes our game.” She told Ender to play along and try his best to follow instructions until he could take control. This advice was not helpful to Ender, who would now be discouraged to fight for what he believed was right. This lake-side conversation with Valentine put some bad ideas into him. It made him think that Graff and Anderson were not controlling him, but helping him, that he had to fight the Buggers, and that he must just wait for things to get better. Although Valentine manipulated Ender, it was because she was doing to help him and because she was