Title: Ender's Game: Important Themes and Motifs - BrightHub Education
Headings: Ender's Game: Important Themes and Motifs
Ender's Game: Important Themes and Motifs
Page content
Shades of Grey
Children and Adults
Games and Reality
Good and Evil, Friends and Enemies
The Ends and the Means
This post is part of the series: Study Guides for Ender’s Game

Content: He is never fully at peace with himself, though, and must deal with the consequences of what he has done. Ender faces the same dilemma again with the Buggers. If an alien race is possibly trying to destroy your world, is it justified to destroy them first? In many ways the adults who created Battle School have made this decision for Ender, believing that as long as humanity survives anything they do is all right. But this is never so easy for Ender to accept, and the end of the novel deals with his guilt and eventual acceptance of his role in the genocide. Card himself makes no judgments; he only asks us to consider just how far this kind of justification can be taken. It is up to us to decide if the ends in the novel—self preservation, saving the human race—justified the means taken to achieve them. This post is part of the series: Study Guides for Ender’s Game
Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card, is a psychological science fiction novel used in classrooms to illustrate a variety of themes and concepts.