I think the overarching statement that this powerful novel
makes about humanity is the way in which the novel constantly shows that the boundary
between what is classified as "good" and what is "bad" is blurred. It is very difficult
to determine what action is "good," as even those actions that are done for the good of
humanity, like, for example, the training of Ender, is very bad, as is made perfectly
clear by the way that Ender is mistreated, isolated from those that love him and placed
into dangerous situations without any support or defence. Consider the conversation that
Graff has in the final chapter where these crimes are explored in further
detail:
People
were crazy for a while there. Mistreatment of children, negligent homicide--those videos
of Bonzo's and Stilson's deaths were pretty gruesome. To watch one child do that to
another.
Such hideous crimes
are justified, in the end, as Graff says by what was "necessary for the preservation of
the human race," yet one of the biggest questions that haunts us as we finish the novel
is whether such activities and blatant mistreatment of children can ever be justified,
no matter what the threat facing the human race is.
The
biggest example of this however is Ender's destruction of an entire species. He is lied
to throughout, thinking that it is just a game, whereas in fact he is committing
genocide to an extent that is unimaginable. The way that he is tricked into being a
murderer is again representative of the blurred boundaries between good and evil. He
saves humanity but only by being deceived into slaughtering an entire species, and this
is something that haunts him for the rest of his life. The message of the novel seems to
be that the two concepts of "good" and "bad" never exist by themselves. They are always
muddied or tainted, as good slips into bad and vice versa.
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