Ender’s Game: Chapter 15 Summary & Analysis

In the beginning to this chapter, we learn that Graff’s defense—that the ends justify the means—has paid off. More surprisingly, we find that Graff—an agent of war—has become the Minister of Colonization—an agent for growth and exploration. We must hope, then, that his new kind of “colonization” will not be of the violent and oppressive kind experienced on Earth—or that which Graff himself previously advocated in attacking the Buggers’ home planet.

One small, final sign of Graff’s decency as a human being is that he keeps Locke and Demosthenes’ identities hidden. Previously, we’d wondered if he was only using this as blackmail for Valentine because he needed her help. Now, we see that he has at least some genuine loyalty to the Wiggin family.

Now, as ever, Ender is isolated from his friends. They all fought together, but Ender bears responsibility for launching the Dr. Device that won the war for humanity. He hates the worship he receives from other people—both because it further alienates him from other people who might otherwise be his friends or peers, and because to him, it feels like he has done something horrible, not praiseworthy.

In this reconciliation scene, Ender reunites with the one person whom he’s been missing all these years, and the one person capable of loving and understanding him outside of his fame. Valentine senses that Ender can never return to Earth, as Ender has become a new kind of person, one totally divorced from the realities of life on Earth, so that the planet isn’t his real “home” anymore. It’s also implied that there just isn’t enough space on Earth for both Ender and Peter, his brother, without there being some major conflicts.

Valentine knows that Peter is as manipulative as ever—so she wants to take Ender far away, where Peter can’t get at him. Curiously, Ender agrees to stay away from Earth, but not because he’s afraid of Peter. Rather, he wants to find out as much information as he can about the Buggers—the civilization he destroyed—and honor their memory. This scene echoes the earlier scene between Ender and Valentine, in which Ender claimed that he didn’t want to defeat Peter—he wanted to love Peter. It’s as if by killing the Buggers Ender has moved past his childhood disputes with Peter, and now wants to love and understand his “enemies,” the Buggers themselves.

Ender follows through on his promise to understand the Buggers in all their complexities. There is no practical purpose in understanding something that’s already long dead, but Ender does so anyway, largely to cope with his own sense of loss and guilt at having wiped out an entire civilization. Valentine, for her part, participates in a similar act of historical reconstruction and understanding, writing books that deal with the Bugger War’s history.

Ender reaches this surreal, dreamlike place, and comes to realize that the Buggers have been watching him for years. When he played the Giant’s game, the Buggers were watching, using their ESP (which Graff described to Ender in the previous chapter) and affecting the game itself—and thus Ender’s psychology as well. This explains how the Battle School computer accessed new images of Peter Wiggin’s face for the mirror in the game. We now understand that the Buggers procured these images and sent them to the Battle School computer.

Ender’s understanding and empathy make him ideally suited to communicate with this hive-queen—supposedly his sworn enemy. It’s thus ultimately suggested that the original Bugger queen knew Ender would be the one to destroy her people, and so she influenced him through the Giant game so that he would also be a figure suited to help rebuild the Bugger race. Ender comes to realize that humans were deeply wrong to destroy the Buggers—who had indeed stopped thinking of humans as enemies. It’s also important that Ender has these realizations as he cradles a pupa—it’s as if Ender is being symbolically reborn in the moment when he looks back with regret for his acts of violence.

Ender now uses his influence to speak for those who are no longer alive. His notion of looking at the world grow so popular that it becomes the dominant religion of the new colonies (and “Speaker for the Dead” is the name of Card’s sequel to the book as well). The ethos of the speaker for the dead is that it is valuable to try to understand those who are unlike oneself. This is the very philosophy Ender has followed his entire life, except now he uses his empathy for peace, not war.

Here, after a lifetime of hating Ender and competing with him, Peter reaches out to his brother, seemingly desperate for reconciliation. Ender, for his part, feels that he needs to reconcile with his brother, the source of so much of his anger and self-hatred. Ender has been trying to overcome his destructive tendencies ever since leaving with Valentine, and now finds that he can treat his brother’s life with honesty and respect. Throughout his life, Ender has fought battles while secretly thinking he’s like Peter. It’s only appropriate that now, giving up battle forever, Ender comes to understand who Peter really is—both the good and the bad. Of course, all this information is explained rather quickly and vaguely here, but it will also be material for Card’s multiple sequels.

In this optimistic ending, Card implies that healing isn’t an event so much as it is an ongoing process. Thus, Ender can be said to “atone” for the crime of destroying the Buggers insofar as he searches for a new home for the pupa he’s carrying, and seeks to give the Buggers new life as a species. Card doesn’t give us any information about this search (that’s a story for several more novels) but the final sentence implies that after many years of searching, Ender’s quest does come to an end.