The over whelming theme throughout Ender’s Game is empathy. Ender uses this great ability of empathy to eventually become the leader he is destined to be. Starting at a young age, seen through his first incident at school with Stilson, Ender follows a philosophy of winning for all time. Winning just that single battle is never enough for him, to him he needs to finish his enemy completely so he will never have to fight them again. By believing and acting this way Ender is constantly questioning if he is nothing more than just another version of Peter.
Ender has to learn that he can never balance his Peter side and his Valentine side. After the destruction of the Hive Queen’s home planet, Ender is given a chance to prove he is not just like Peter. During all his time at the Battle School, the Hive Queen had been telepathically communicating with Ender, allowing him to become the speaker for the dead. In killing off the whole formic species, Ender understands the greatest form of empathy there is. Being able to love your enemy so much that in killing them, he was killing a version of himself.
In every battle Ender doesn’t fight to win just that once, but he fights to win for all time. At the age of six we see Ender, after his monitor was removed, come in conflict with another child Stilson at school. After he had knocked Stilson to the ground, Ender knew that it was wrong to continue to kick an opponent who lay helpless, “only an animal would do that” (7). However, Ender knew that he would have to end this now, or he would have to fight a battle just like this again. “I have to win this now, and for all time, or I’ll fight it every day and it will get worse and worse” (7).
When he returns home, Colonel Graff asks Ender what his motives were for why he kept kicking him when he had already won. Again Ender repeats the same reasoning for his brutal acts, “I wanted to win all the next ones, too. So they’d leave me alone” (19). A couple years later while at Battle School Ender becomes at odds with Bonzo Madrid. Even with everything stacked against him, Ender’s army defeated Bonzo’s army. He realizes that Bonzo, if he didn’t already, hates Ender to his core, “this would surely turn his rage murderous [… Bonzo will be thirsting for blood now” (195).
Just before lunch Ender heads to the showers and he finds himself surrounded by seven boys, with Bonzo as the leader. Ender understands that the other boys aren’t the ones who are the threat; it is Bonzo who wants to kill him. Towards the end of the fight it’s clear he has injured Bonzo badly enough and Ender knows it could be over, but he does not want to have to fight him again: “Ender knew he could walk away and end the battle, but the battle would only be fought again” (211).
He knocks Bonzo to the ground and kicks him in the crotch leaving him motionless, and unresponsive. Ender had once again succeeded in winning for all time against Bonzo. Ender is constantly in conflict with himself, always wondering if he turned out to be just like his brother Peter. Each time he comes in conflict with someone his answer is always violence, and each time it makes himself question if he is no better than Peter. After getting into the fight with Stilson at school, Ender realizes how he acted reflects the Peter in him, “I am just like Peter.
Take my monitor away and I am just like Peter” (8). We see the same reaction again while they are launching, and Ender breaks the arm of Bernard, another launchie: “I am Peter. I’m just like him. And Ender hated himself” (33). After finding Peter’s face in the mirror looking back at him in the fantasy game, Ender reminds himself of how he killed the snake, and how it felt so much like when he had torn the ear off of a boy. It reminded him of the way he had destroyed Stilson, and of when he had broken Bernard’s arm. He believes that the game is lying, that it doesn’t know him.
However, when he stops to think about it, he realizes maybe he is: “then a worse fear, that he was a killer, only better at it than Peter ever was” (118). After the destruction of the buggers, Ender realizes that he had been completely betrayed by Colonel Graff. Graff explains to him that it had to be a trick or Ender never would have done it: “We needed a commander with so much empathy that he would think like the buggers, understand them and anticipate them. [… ]If you were the kind of person who would do it even if you knew, you could never have understood the buggers well enough” (298).
Even though they tried to convince Ender that were the ones responsible, he sees himself as a killer, as Peter. However the Hive Queen gives Ender an opportunity to redeem himself. In his essay “How it should have ended” for Ender’s World, Eric James Stone explains how important it is to Ender, that in finding a new home for the Hive Queen he is given a new sense of purpose and understanding of who he is: “In Ender’s mind, killing off an entire species is what Peter would do. Therefore, the chance to restore an extinct species is the final signifier that Ender is not like Peter. [… Ender has found peace in his new purpose, and thus his emotional arc is complete” (12).
Peter iced out for being too violent, but Ender succeeded by being strategically violent in never allowing his enemy to get back up. By rescuing the Hive Queen, he proves that he is more than just a smarter Peter. During his time at battle school, leading up to the final invasion, the Hive Queen had been telepathically communicating with Ender. The fantasy game was originally an advanced computer program that was played by students at the battle school and was used to analyze the student’s personality.
After the destruction of the buggers Ender goes out to colonize their worlds, acting as their governor. He is then asked to go in search of a place for the new colony to be established. Ender has this overwhelming feeling that he had been in this place before. The more he looked, he saw that it resembled the mind game: “it’s like a giant died here,’ said Abra, ‘and the Earth grew up to cover his carcass” (317). Ender didn’t know how it was possible, but he knew that the buggers had built this place for him.
He continues on to find the cliff, and the castle tower with notches in it as if it was made to be climbed by him. Ender finds the mirror with a faced scratched into it, but when he pulled away the mirror nothing jumped out at him. Instead Ender finds a hollowed out space with what at first appears to be an egg: “there was a white ball of silk with a few frayed strands sticking out here and there. An egg? No. ” He knew then what it was, he knew that it was a pupa of a queen bugger, and it was ready to bring forth hundreds of thousands of buggers.
Standing there in front of the pupa, she gave him a vision, one of him taking her and finding a new place for her to live again. She showed Ender an image of the humans being destroyed by the buggers, but along with that came a feeling that was so great that Ender wept their tears for them. It was there he realized that the Hive Queen had been communicating with him the whole time through the fantasy games: “In the agony of my tortured dreams they came to know me, even as I spent my days destroying them; they found my fear of them, and also found I had no knowledge of killing them” (321).
John Brown, in his essay” The Monsters Heart” The Hive Queen: From Revulsion to Love in Ender’s Game, explains why the buggers chose to reach out like they did and why Ender was able to be the commander him needed to be because of it: “The crowning scene of Ender’s Game is all about going beyond the surface to know why someone does a thing and how knowing the why can completely change our appraisal of that person. Ender becomes the Speaker for the Dead, but it’s in the scene with the hive queen that the reader experiences what such a speaking means” (27).
They had created this place so Ender would understand it when he saw it, and he would have the empathetic ability to see that they never meant to murder, they never knew that they could live in peace with us. Ender’s Valentine side was so strong that it was able to overcome death when it came to the hive queen. Ender had so much empathy that all the time he had spent understanding his enemy he had also loved them.
Ender’s great power of empathy is what allowed him to be the great commander he needed to be. He believed in winning for all time all the way up to the destruction of the buggers. During all of that time he was constantly battling with the idea that he was no better than Peter. Through his love towards the hive queen, he proved to himself that he was more than just a smarter Peter when he was given a chance to redeem himself and to restore the species.