Arnold
English 10 Honors
19 September 2012 A Satisfactory Ending: What Does It Need? In his novel Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card suggests that an appropriate ending should not answer all of the readers’ questions but give them the chance to think of their own type of closure. Using and looking into symbols, scenes of the novel, and relationships, the reader gambles the ending with their own imagination. In Ender’s Game, Card puts in symbols that hint to a complete ending. Ender “passes” his “final examination,” he destroys a race that humans know very little of and find dangerous. The buggers’ “planet burst apart, becoming a sphere of bright dust, hurtling outward.” (Card 295). Card implies that the physical bugger world meets its end, and the beginning of a new world for anyone to take. Peter and Ender play a game that represents another symbol. The game represents a direct symbol to the real world and what happened. Peter symbolizes the evil that still exists among the humans after the humans wipe out the bugger population. Card puts together symbols that all links together to let the reader make their own image of what happens after the ending. A reader should closely examine certain scenes in the novel to judge a satisfactory conclusion. The scene where Ender finds the pupa of a queen bugger definitely stands out. “The pupa of a queen bugger, already fertilized by the larval males, ready, out of her own body, to hatch a hundred thousand buggers, including a few queens and males.” (Card 319). When Ender finds the pupa, it gives the reader hope for the future, because it lets Ender redeem himself. The buggers explain to Ender that no true meaning lies under the Third Invasion because the buggers “did not mean to murder,” (Card 321). The inferior buggers admit to Ender that they need him. Ender helps them because he never wants to destroy them in the first place. The reader can go deeper into what Card actually meant and discover second meanings ultimately drawing more accurate conclusions if they examine certain scenes. Readers should look into specific relationships between characters because they reveal an underlying truth. The relationship between Ender and Valentine represents the most prominent and important relationship throughout the whole novel. It seems for Ender that his love for Valentine has broken because of the fact that