Ender’s Game Plotline

By Robert Li

Exposition

• Ender lives with his mother and father. He has a kind sister named Valentine, and a brother named Peter. Valentine is kinder while his brother is a brute.

• This story takes place in the future. Earth is at war with an alien species called the Buggers.

• The world needs a new leader, someone bright, cunning, and a quick-thinker.

Rising action

• Ender beats up a boy at school because he is defending himself. A military program notices Ender’s intelligence and wits. So they recruit him for Battle School.

• Once he arrives at the school, he is noticed by the head to be the brightest pupil. They then isolate him to develop a mind of his own.

• As he quickly rises up the ranks of the school, he makes several enemies, all of them are jealous of him or resent him.

• At the school, they have null-gravity combat training, and despite being at such a young age, Ender is given an army, Dragon Army.

Climax

• Ender soon moves to another school leaving his enemies behind. This school is training Ender to fight the Buggers as he has been selected to lead Earth into war.

• The ex-leader, Mazer Rackham, is his mentor. In class he trains Ender to take command of fleets of space-ships and fight the enemy. However, what Ender doesn’t know is that he is being tricked. He isn’t fighting Mazer, he’s fighting the real war and every ship he looses, means more human lives lost.

Falling action

• “Mazer” still trains Ender with the fight simulator. Ender has beaten Mazer several times at increasing odds, so they decide to put him to the final test. As a “test to get him to the next school” he faces “Mazer” in one final battle. This time at the enemies final frontier. He’s outnumbered and out gunned but he still manages to defeat the enemy.

• Ender has wiped out the Buggers from the Universe.

Resolution

• At the end of everything, Mazer and the head of the entire program to confess to him. That he wasn’t fighting a simulation.

• When it dawned on him, he broke down. Ender is a peaceful person. He doesn’t like to kill, he only does it when he needs to.

• He realizes that he has killed all the Buggers. And he realizes that every time he lost a ship, human lives where lost, on his watch.

Theme

• The theme of this book was not to believe everything that you hear. In other words, when someone tells you something, treat it with a does of skepticism.

• Ender was told by Mazer that he was fighting a simulation. In the end, he found out if wasn’t a simulation.

Conflict

• The conflict in the story was Ender vs. himself• Ender hated to kill. He wanted to be peaceful

like his sister Valentine. However, he demonstrated violence before school, at school, and during simulation.