“Ender’s Game” (post 3) by Orson Scott Card (post 4): Ender is self-contradictory and sees another person in the mirror, both signs of multiple personality.

The reader is told that Ender (age 6) is a genetic hybrid of his older brother and sister, that he is “half Peter [age 10] and half Valentine [age 8]” (1, p. 24).

Since Peter is said to be sadistic and Valentine is said to be nice, Ender is said to have a contradictory nature on the basis of genetic inheritance. But readers of this blog know that puzzling contradictions may be a clue that a person has multiple personality (search “self-contradictions” and “puzzling inconsistency”).

The fact is, Ender’s contradictions go beyond his siblings. He is more sadistic than Peter, since Ender actually kills another boy (Stilson) unnecessarily, while Peter, though he had often threatened to kill Ender, never actually kills anyone. Moreover, Ender is nicer than Valentine, since he is goodhearted and loyal, while she is often manipulative, self-serving, and hypocritical: through much of the novel she allies herself with Peter.

How can Ender or any person be both truly nice and truly homicidal? There are two possibilities, medical and psychological. A nice person could have a brain disease that causes episodes of homicidal rage. Or, a person could have a psychological condition in which one personality is nice and another personality is evil.

Alternate Personality in the Mirror

As discussed in numerous past posts about other writers, persons with multiple personality may sometimes see one of their alternate personalities when they look in the mirror (search “mirror” and “mirrors”). This happens with Ender in a number of dream or video game sequences:

“And in the mirror he saw a face that he easily recognized. It was Peter…” (1, p. 117). “All the while, the face of Peter Wiggin in the mirror stayed and looked at him” (1, p. 141). “ ‘In my dreams,’ said Ender, ‘I’m never sure whether I’m really me’ ” (1, p. 287).

How could Ender have gotten a “Peter” alternate personality who was more violent than the actual Peter? The alternate personality may have been an identification with Peter at the times that Peter had threatened to kill Ender (as Peter had done on numerous occasions).

Some critics misinterpret Ender’s seeing Peter in the mirror as reflecting Ender’s genetic inheritance similar to Peter’s, but Peter was not the kind of person who actually killed people. And most critics don’t know that seeing someone else in the mirror is a symptom of multiple personality.

What did the author intend?

It is clear that Orson Scott Card has given some thought to multiple personality, per se, as seen in the passage I previously quoted from his book on creating characters:

“Who is telling your story?…It is never exactly your own voice…You have many voices…Each of your voices has its own vocabulary. They overlap, but less than you might suppose. Each has its own sentence structure…

“Does that sound like a split personality? Perhaps the function of our brain that lets us develop these different ‘voices’ is the very function that drives multiple personalities—it seems likely enough…”

But it seems unlikely that Card had read anything about mirrors and multiple personality. And nothing is said about multiple personality by any character or narrator in Ender’s Game. So I do not think Card intended the mirror episodes to imply multiple personality. But why, then, are the multiple personality-indicative mirror episodes in the novel?

It is one more example of what I have called “gratuitous multiple personality” (search it to see previous posts), which is when indications of multiple personality are found in a novel, but they have not been put there intentionally, and the only reason they are there is that they probably reflect the author’s own psychology.

Buggers

In a previous post, I speculated that naming the evil invaders from outer space “buggers” (slang for sodomites) reflected the author’s opposition to homosexuality. But at the conclusion of Ender’s Game, Ender believes that the Buggers have probably been misunderstood, and may have been good guys after all.

Interestingly, Ender says that the Buggers are of one mind: their Queen does the thinking and all the rest of them are connected to her telepathically. In contrast, each human thinks independently. Perhaps Orson Scott Card is implying that the Buggers represent a life form with one personality, while Humans represent a life form with multiple personalities.

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