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Human Buggers

Card, Ender's Game Finish -- Jerz: EL150 (Intro to Literary Study) "If we had kissed, it would have been the miracle to make us human in each other's eyes. Instead we killed each other."

I really thought this was a great ending. I was sort of expecting the story to end once Ender defeated the buggers and all the political intrigue on Earth had finished, but it still didn't resolve all of Ender's inner turmoil. But I really love the way Card humanizes the buggers, because it would have been easy to just kind of brush them off as big bugs that we don't need to bother being compassionate about. Finally, after all these long hard passages about training in battlerooms and learning about strategies to save the world from this distant enemy, we got to see from the perspective of those distant buggers and realize they have all the flaws and arrogance that humans do. In the end, we realize that the whole war was fought over failed communication.
It's a really cool commentary on how people are essentially the same no matter where they're from. The buggers didn't even consider the fact that humans were capable of the same thoughts and feelings that they had, and so they started the whole chain of events that led to their annihilation. But if we just start taking down our barriers that we set up, we could empathize with each other and realize we aren't "the only thinking beings in the universe."

Comments (2)

MacKenzie Harbison:

Though I didn't like the ending, I do appreciate the humanization that Card gives to the buggers too. Of all the science fiction I have read, which isn't much, this is the only one I have read that shows the other side of the story. So this was a first for me and I enjoyed it. And the majority of differences between people (or aliens) is simply failed communication. We rely so much on what we have developed; it's hard to accept others form of communication without there being some confrontation.

I liked that aspect of the ending as well. It added something more to the story...made it seem a little more realistic. In real life, no one and no thing is ever either good or evil--there are many shades of grey in between. This showed that. I also agree that it was good to note that the buggers may have been different from humans in many ways, but they are also similar as well.

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