Ender's Game as theological metaphor
Posted: Mon Nov 29, 2010 11:50 pm
I was recently rereading Ender's game, and another layer to the story occurred to me, brought on by someone's question about why OSC had Ender be a child. It occurred to me that it is not uncommon to refer to mankind as God's children, that and making him a child means he doesn't have as much power over his own life as an adult would have. He is a victim of his elders.
In this way, Ender (and the other children) are forced to comply with the will of entities they neither understand nor necessarily even agree with. It is stated more than once that the teachers are the enemy; if one takes this book as metaphor about our own lives, the teachers could represent God, and the children are people. Ender is, throughout the book, forced to comply with the teacher's plan, despite not knowing (or even being allowed to know) what he is actually doing. In the same way, it could be said that God forces us to comply with his plan without any intention of telling us what the end result will be. How is this fair?
Of course, God doesn't necessarily have to be the bearded man in the sky: perhaps its nature, perhaps our teachers are our own nature, our own will to survive forces us to act in ways which we'd rather not, in ways that hurt us and drive us to the very brink of sanity, and we don't even get to know the deeper meaning behind our actions. That is truly the action of a cruel God.
In this way, Ender (and the other children) are forced to comply with the will of entities they neither understand nor necessarily even agree with. It is stated more than once that the teachers are the enemy; if one takes this book as metaphor about our own lives, the teachers could represent God, and the children are people. Ender is, throughout the book, forced to comply with the teacher's plan, despite not knowing (or even being allowed to know) what he is actually doing. In the same way, it could be said that God forces us to comply with his plan without any intention of telling us what the end result will be. How is this fair?
Of course, God doesn't necessarily have to be the bearded man in the sky: perhaps its nature, perhaps our teachers are our own nature, our own will to survive forces us to act in ways which we'd rather not, in ways that hurt us and drive us to the very brink of sanity, and we don't even get to know the deeper meaning behind our actions. That is truly the action of a cruel God.