“Ender’s Game” (post 2) by Orson Scott Card (post 3): Why does Author’s Introduction completely ignore that child-aged protagonist is victim of child abuse?

I am still reading the novel and have just reread the Author’s Introduction.

“Ender’s Game is a story about gifted children,” says the author in his Introduction. “Ender’s Game asserts the personhood of children…Children are a perpetual, self-renewing underclass, helpless to escape from the decisions of adults until they become adults themselves” (1).

But that is a very distorted and misleading description of Ender’s Game. The novel informs the reader that its six-year-old protagonist (Andrew, nicknamed “Ender”) has been the victim of child abuse by Peter, his sadistic ten-year-old brother. Moreover, this issue is not just mentioned in passing and forgotten. Peter is a continuing character.

Thus, contrary to what the author—or, at least, his host personality—says in the Introduction, this is clearly not a novel about gifted children per se or in general, but about a gifted child who has been the victim of child abuse, perpetrated by his psychopathic older brother.

Who wrote this Author’s Introduction? He says something possibly revealing: “…never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like…the same person that I am today.”

That would seem to be a preposterous statement. A gifted child at age six might feel that he is smarter and more advanced than most adults think he is, but a six-year-old child, no matter how gifted, does not feel like the same person he will feel like many years later. Unless the personality writing the Author’s Introduction was a six-year-old child’s “Adult” alternate personality, who saw himself as an adult ever since his creation in the child’s imagination. And since this “Adult” personality has never identified with being an abused child, that issue is ignored in his Introduction.

Of course, I’m not in a position to know anything about the author’s life. I have no inside information. All I can say for certain is that, for some reason, there is a discrepancy between the Author’s Introduction and the novel.

Chapter One (continued)

In my previous post on the novel’s first chapter, I neglected to mention its very beginning:

“I’ve watched through his eyes, I’ve listened through his ears, and I tell you he’s the one” (1, p. 1, first sentence). This is said by recruiters from Earth’s main military academy, who are scouting for future military leaders. They have implanted a device in Ender so they can see what he sees, hear what he hears, and monitor his life.

What kind of thing is this for a novelist to imagine? It is not like a psychotic delusion of having a computer chip implanted in your brain (to explain the irrational voices that you hear). Rather, it may be the perspective of an alternate personality, who, when not out and in control, is seeing and hearing everything that the host personality does, but from inside, behind-the-scenes.

1. Orson Scott Card. Ender’s Game. New York, Tor, 1985/1991.