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The way the content is organized and presented is seamlessly smooth, innovative, and comprehensive. The chapter begins with a conversation between X and Y who, we can now guess, are Graff and Anderson , respectively. Active Themes. Love, Empathy, and Destruction. The immediate introduction of a pistol also emphasizes the cutthroat nature of life here. A man enters the barracks and orders the students to pay attention. As Dap says this, Ender notices the boy whose arm he broke, who seems to have made a quick recovery.
The boy has already assembled a gang, much as Stilson did back at school. The Battle School is a centrifugal structure, with the outward force substituting for gravity this is an interesting connection between the work of Card and his idol, Arthur C. Clark, who introduced the concept of a centrifugal space station in A Space Odyssey.
When the Wiggin parents get home, Mrs. Wiggin commiserates with Ender about the monitor being removed, and Mr. Wiggin goes on and on about how happy he is that they get to keep all three children, that "they still had a Third. That night, when Peter leaves their bunk bed to go to the bathroom, he returns and stands over Ender.
Ender expects him to smother him with a pillow, but instead, Peter leans over and whispers, "Ender, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I know how it feels, I'm sorry, I'm your brother, I love you. The manipulation of human beings is pervasive in this society of the future. It is exemplified best by the discussion about Ender in the initial conversation between the two adults.
They agree to "take him" in order to save the world, and they thus are going to start to control all aspects of Ender's life. Their desperation to ensure that he succeeds as "the one" is clear, however, so their manipulation is set up as something to be excused because it is necessary. The conversations in the beginnings of many chapters, set in different type, act as an adult counterpoint to the focus on the children's lives through their own perspective. From the beginning, Ender is an extremely bright but very cynical young boy.
He understands that the nurse is lying when she says that the monitor removal will not hurt, realizing that every time an adult says that, it means that it really will hurt. From such experiences, he infers that lies are more dependable than the truth. This is a cynical point of view for anyone, but it is especially cynical for a boy that young.
The author has presented a future in which many children are not carefree anymore; indeed, Ender and his siblings, and even his classmates, seem mature far beyond their years. Ender's real name is Andrew Wiggin, but Ender is the name he chose for himself. All but his parents tend to use it. The nickname "Ender" is significant in that it foreshadows his eventual role in ending the bugger war. Moreover, Ender "ends" many other things in addition to soon enough the lives of several billion buggers: he kills Stilson and will kill Bonzo, acting decisively.
He also ends other parts of his life beyond the war with the buggers: he will successfully complete all the tasks set for him. Ender is caught between the characters of Valentine, who is too good to be "the one," and Peter, who is too evil. Ender is more good than bad. Instrumentally he also is extremely good, not only because he tends to make good decisions, but also because he makes up for mistakes.
Ender is kind, fair, forgiving, and will make major sacrifices for the good of the world. Ender makes hard choices that include pain and suffering beyond what we might imagine Valentine to be able to stand. Peter, on the other hand, always acts out of his own self-interest, and he is willing to be violent to achieve his ends. Even though Peter's actions sometimes yield good results, he does them for the wrong reasons.
Part of Ender's maturity is that he "knew the unspoken rules of manly warfare. He decides not to follow the "rule" against kicking an opponent while he is down. Even so, he does it for the purpose of ending the fight decisively: "now, and for all time, or I'll fight it every day and it will get worse and worse. Thus, while ruthlessness is sometimes necessary, he tends to use it only when nothing else is available.
In this he is somewhere between his two siblings in temperament. After huring Stilson, Ender thinks, "I am just like Peter. Take the monitor away, and I am just like Peter. Even so, the fact of his conscience seems to make him different from Peter, who displays little effort to stop himself, at least at the beginning of the book.
Peter seldom shows remorse after doing the horrible things that he does. Ender is a "Third," and although the designation is not fully explained in the first chapter, it becomes easy to conclude that being a "Third" means being the third child in a family.
It also reflects the idea of being a "third-class" citizen. Since Ender's family has three children, his parents are breaking the population code with permission by having more than the allotted two children. The government authorized his parents to have a third child, but the other children, including his brother and the kids in his class at school, mock him anyway for being a Third. They may manipulate his life, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.
Equally important, the conversation frames the events for the chapter. The two people discuss how Ender must be surrounded by enemies, and in school he literally is surrounded by his enemies. This book is very much the story of how the worries of the adults play out in Ender's life, and this rhetorical method allows Card to tell the story from two different perspectives.
It always starts with the view of the adults and then moves into the lives of the children they are describing. The second theme that this chapter initiates is Ender's struggle to confront his sense of loneliness. He has only himself to rely on, and this forces him to be ruthless in dealing with Stilson. He is also singled out because he is a Third, a third child, something so rare that it took government authorization to make it possible.
Ender has the ability to survive on his own, but there is a great personal risk. His brother Peter needs no one, and yet Ender fears nothing more than becoming his brother. The issue then is whether or not Ender can retain his humanity and still defeat his enemies.
Of course, this issue is alluded to in the conversation that starts the book. The fact that Ender cries because he believes he has become just like Peter shows that he is wrong. He is still a good human being who does not want to do any harm to anyone. However, if forced, he will stand up for himself, and it is clear that standing in Ender's way is not a good idea.
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