An
Early Start on the Hero’s Journey
In a sense, all literature and, in fact, all entertainment, features a sort of journey. The way in which the journey manifests itself can be quite different from story to story, from song to song, and even from painting to painting. A common theme among many of the great tales, however, is none other than the hero’s journey. Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces charts out the archetypal path of history’s most famous heroes from mythologies new and old from all around the world. With each step delineated, it is easy to relate the journey to modern works such as Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, wherein a boy must leave his home planet to complete the hero’s journey.
By using the hero archetype, Card is able to tap into the reader’s subconscious immediately and use that emotional connection to take his science fiction story to new places. The audience is not only along for the ride, but invested in the journey because it is one they recognize just as sure as they recognize their own name. It is in this way that artistic freedom is achieved by adhering to an already established structure. Campbell divides the hero’s journey into three phases: departure, initiation, and return. Each of these phases has several key parts that work together to expand and complete the archetype. In Ender’s Game, Card illustrates the phases and touches upon nearly all of these subsets.
Campbell writes: “The first stage off the mythological journey – which we have designated the ‘call to adventure’ – signifies that destiny has summon the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown. This fateful region of both treasure and danger may be variously represented: as distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state; but it is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, superhuman deeds, and impossible delight” (Campbell 55). The hero’s journey works well in science fiction writing, as many of the necessary elements of the ‘departure’ present themselves naturally and believably as part of the setting. In Ender’s Game, Ender Wiggin’s call to adventure takes him literally “above the sky” to a battle school in space where there is no natural light and where he will spend a good deal of his time in zero gravity where personal movement and battle formations are “strangely fluid” and “superhuman.” During the departure phase, there are two choices: to accept or to refuse. A refusal never ends well if precedent is to be believed, but hesitation is often a huge part of the hero’s journey and enables the audience to empathize with his indecision about whether to heed the call or not. “Ender almost said, I want to. But he held his tongue. This would keep him out of school, but that was stupid, that was just a problem for a few days. It would keep him away from Peter – that was more important, that might be a matter of life itself. But to leave Mother and Father, and above all, to leave Valentine. And become a soldier” (Card 21).
One of the important subsets of the departure phase is the appearance of a mentor or helper. “Not infrequently, the supernatural helper is masculine in form. [Some] wizard, hermit, shepherd, or smith, who appears, to supply the amulets and advice that the hero will require” (Campbell 72). Colonel Graff is the supernatural helper in the story. While he is not supernatural per se, he possesses a certain omniscience and heightened understanding of Ender through prior monitoring of the boy as well as through the continued video and audio surveillance. This latent character takes on a “more than human” role in Ender’s life and education. Behind the scenes, he is the boy’s greatest supporter and protector, while up his upfront actions seem contradictory to this. Graff helps Ender by hurting him and setting him up for failure and it is in this way he pushes him to be the best solder possible.
“Again a blow to the head. Laughter from the boys. Didn’t Graf see this? Wasn’t he going to stop it? Another blow. Harder. It really hurt. Where was Graff? Then it became clear. Graff had deliberately caused it. It was worse than the abuse in the shows. When the sergeant picked on you, the others liked you better. But when the officer prefers you, the others hate you” (Card 34).
The audience cannot help but have sympathy for this little kid, six years old, who, before even really starting his journey, has been set up as a target. His age is one of the many ways that Card expounds upon the myth of the hero. While it is sad to see a hero such as Odysseus being put through the trials of the gods, it is heartbreaking to witness little Ender Wiggin put through the trials of abusive peers and unfair adults.
“Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials. This is a favorite phase of the myth-adventure. It has produced a world literature of miraculous tests and ordeals. The hero is covertly aided by the advice, amulets, and secret agents of the supernatural helper whom he met before his entrance into this region” (Campbell 97). Whether he consciously meant to or not, Card creates a perfect depiction of the ambiguous and fantastical landscape of trials and tribulations of the hero’s journey. In Ender’s Game the children in battle school play a number of games in groups or individually. One such game, Fairyland, is played on a computer console and truly embodies the dreamscape that Campbell so wonderfully describes as the favorite part of the myth-adventure. In the following passage, Ender overcomes an impossible task in the Fairyland game: “And instead of pushing his face into one of the liquids, he kicked one over, then the other, and dodged the Giant’s huge hands as the Giant shouted, ‘Cheater, cheater!’ He jumped at the Giant’s face, clambered up his lip and nose, and began to dig in the Giant’s eye. The stuff came away like cottage cheese, and as the Giant screamed, Ender’s figure burrowed into the eye, climbed right in, burrowed in and in. […] He had made it. He ought to explore. He ought to climb down from the Giant’s face and see what he had finally achieved. Instead he signed off, put his desk in his locker, stripped off his clothes and pulled his blanket over him. He hadn’t meant to kill the Giant. This was supposed to be a game” (Card 69-70). The covert aid from his mentor or supernatural helper comes later, when the Fairyland game begins to play with Ender’s mind. At that point Colonel Graff intercedes quietly though asking Ender’s sister to write him a letter, therefore corralling him back on track.
Further trials, the meat and potatoes of the initiation phase of the hero’s journey, include an escalation of danger in Ender’s personal and professional life. Everything compiles and compiles while Graff seemingly does nothing. Again, this is the typical path of a true hero, but told in such a wonderfully atypical way that it appeals intimately to the audience, putting them in Ender’s corner which is fortunate because so often he is led to believe that there is no one on his side.
“He heard his door open softly, then close. He knew at once that it was his battle instructions. He opened his eyes, expecting to find the darkness of early morning before 0600. Instead, the lights were on. He was naked and when he moved the bed was soaking wet. His were puffy and painful from crying. He looked at the clock on his desk. 1820, it said. It’s the same day. I already had a battle today, I had two battles today – the bastards know what I’ve been through, and they’re doing this to me. […] He sat on the edge of the bed. The note trembled in his hand. I can’t do this, he said silently. And then not silently. ‘I can’t do this’” (Card 233).
There is more to initiation however than just a road of trials. Campbell states that “The ultimate adventure, when all barriers and ogres have been overcome, is commonly represented as a mystical marriage of the triumphant hero-soul with the Queen Goddess of the World” (Campbell 109). This Queen is “the paragon of all paragons of beauty, the reply to all desire, the bliss-bestowing goal of every hero’s earthly and unearthly quest. She is mother, sister, mistress, bride” and in Ender’s Game she is Valentine Wiggin (Campbell 110-111). As mentioned before, she is prevailed upon by Graff to write a letter to her brother to encourage him and restore his faith in himself. That is first time she comes to Ender’s side as the “bliss-bestowing” sister. When Graff calls on her a second time, her influence graduates from a letter to a physical meeting. She comes to see him during his brief return to earth: “Ender didn't wave when she walked down the hill toward him, didn't smile when she stepped onto the floating boat slip. But she knew that he was glad to see her, knew it because of the way his eyes never left her face” (Card 256). It is during this meeting that Card truly establishes her as the Goddess figure in the story. She is the one to give the hero exactly what he needs – even if this coincides with others’ agendas for him, she is the beacon for which he will fight.
“Finally Valentine, the sweat dripping off her, the mosquitoes beginning to hover as the dusk came on, took one final dip in the water and then began to push the raft in to shore. Ender showed no sign that he knew what she was doing, but his irregular breathing told her that he was not asleep. When they got to shore, she climbed onto the dock and said, ‘I love you, Ender. More than ever. No matter what you decide’” (Card 265-266). In keeping with the unusual youth of the hero, Card completely bypasses the notion of romantic and sexual love, which, incidentally, is the only way in which Ender remains innocent. The third time that she appears to her brother it is to take him away, to someplace akin to home. Theirs is a strong marriage, a bind, and in the end they live out their lives together.
The other ‘woman’ figure or idea that often rears its head in the initiation phase is the “woman as temptress.” Card doesn't neglect this portion of the myth-adventure despite his avoidance of sexuality within the story. The “woman as temptress” element manifests itself psychoanalytically rather than physiologically. “Depth beyond depth of self-ignorance is fathomed, with the analyst in the role of the helper, the initiatory priest. And always, after the first thrills of getting under way, the adventure develops into a journey of darkness, horror, disgust and phantasmagoric fears” (Campbell 121).
Card smartly depicts Ender’s dive into darkness through use of vivid and horrifying dreams. In this way, the author is able to show a side of Ender that awakens the audience to the true destruction of his soul while allowing them to believe that he may yet come out of this journey somewhat intact. “But in the night he thought of other things. Often he remembered the corpse of the Giant, decaying steadily; he did not remember it, though, in the pixels of the picture on his desk. Instead it was real, the faint odor of death still lingering near it. […] He always left the Giant’s body quickly, and when he got to the playground, the children were always there, wolven and mocking; they wore faces that he knew. Sometimes Peter and sometimes Bonzo, sometimes Stilson and Bernard; just as often though, the savage creatures were Alai and Shen, Dink and Petra; sometimes one of them would be Valentine, and in his dream he also shoved her under the water and waited for her to drown. She writhed in his hands, fought to come up, but at last was still. He dragged her out of the lake and onto the raft, where she lay with her face in the rictus of death. He screamed and wept over her, crying again and again that it was a game, a game, he was only playing! –” (Card 310-311). Thus Card fulfills the temptress aspect of the hero’s journey. By maintaining the paradigm of the myth-adventure, he breaks through it and creates a fresh take on an age old formula, thereby giving the audience something familiar and new at the same time. Another element of the journey that Card warps is the atonement of the father aspect. “Whether he knows it or not, and no matter what his position in society, the father is the initiating priest through whom the young being passes on into the larger world,” which illustrates precisely why Mazer Rackham, rather than any biological father, becomes the mystagogue in the story (Campbell 136). “The mystagogue (father or father-substitute) is to entrust the symbols of office only to a son who has been effectually purged of all inappropriate infantile cathexes” (Campbell 136). Mazer appears to Ender at exactly the moment when he needs him most. Gone is the time for a supernatural helper/mentor and absent is his goddess. The way in which Card brings Mazer into the story is creative and effective all on its own; upon the character’s first actual appearance, he has been mentioned off and on throughout the entire journey, appearing as a standard to live up to, an unsung and archaic hero that most would believe has passed away. He’s such an ideal in Ender’s universe that his inclusion as the mystagogue is absolutely necessary.
“’An enemy, Ender Wiggin,’ whispered the old man. ‘I am your enemy, the first one you’ve ever had who was smarter than you. There is no teacher but the enemy. No one but the enemy will ever tell you what the enemy is going to do. No one but the enemy will ever teach you where you are weak. Only the enemy tells you where he is strong. And the only rules of the game are what you can do to him and what you can stop him from doing to you. I am your enemy from now on. From now on I am your teacher’” (Cardd 288).
The subject of the apotheosis is handled in two ways in Ender’s Game. Firstly, Ender’s triumph over humanity’s enemy – completely before he is even a teenager – raises him to a near godlike status. Mazer tells the boy: “‘And all of them are worried about you. And all of them want you. The greatest military leader in history, they you to lead their armies. The Americans. The Hegemon. Everybody but the Warsaw Pact, and they want you dead’” (Card 329).
Secondly, Ender’s sister, Valentine, embodies a sort of apotheosis all of her own. Throughout the book she publishes political pieces under the identity of Demosthenes. This gives her anonymity, invincibility, and immortality, or at least the appearance of these things. Just like her brother, Valentine, as Demosthenes, becomes hated and loved by the masses. It is through Valentine that Card captures Campbell’s notion of divinity existing only through the shedding of masculine and feminine identifiers. Valentine becomes, to a degree, genderless and sexless – in theory – as she senses a merging of herself with the figure of Demosthenes. She elevates herself into androgyny and becomes more than man or woman and like a god in her own right. “’I’m Demosthenes, Ender. I went out with a bang. A public announcement that I believed so much in the colonization movement that I was going in the first ship myself” (Card 345).
When the story enters the return phase, it becomes time for the hero to bring back the otherworldly knowledge he’s gathered on his quest. Campbell writes: “The full round, the norm of the monomyth, requires that the hero shall now begin the labor of bringing the runes of wisdom, the Golden Fleece, or his sleeping princess, back into the kingdom of humanity, where boon may redound to the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet, or the ten thousand worlds” (Campbell 193). There is a device in Ender’s Game that makes this possible, for Ender himself does not return to Earth to impart wisdom. But even with the help of this device, this task, as Campbell explains, is not an easy one: “How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind’s prudent folly? That is the hero’s ultimate difficult task. How render back into light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark? How represent on a two-dimensional image a three-dimensional form, or in a three-dimensional image a multi-dimensional meaning?” (Campbell 218).
Before completing the full cycle, there is a lull. For a while Ender remains on a hidden outpost, three months journey from Earth. However, “…in so far as one is alive, life will call. Society is jealous of those who remain away from it, and will come knocking at the door,” and Ender is not left alone for long (Campbell 207). Valentine comes to him – she is society come knocking at the door – and convinces him to go with her to a new home. Campbell mentions that sometimes the return includes a magic flight that transports the hero mystically to the place they once knew. He also mentions that in some cases the hero is forcibly brought home. There is no magic flight for Ender, however, his Card does employ a bit of force through Valentine when it comes to bringing the hero home. “’Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to be controlled by good people, by people who love you’” (Card 345). He goes on to live with his sister on the alien home world where he studies the enemy that he defeated. All contact with Earth must now be done via Card’s fictional device called an ansible.
“The myths do not often display in a single image the mystery of the ready transit,” but in Ender’s Game, the ansible is not only displayed, it becomes a trump card that brings the hero’s journey full circle while satisfying the needs of this particular story and the requirements of the myth-adventure (Campbell 229). This device allows Ender and even his sister the “Freedom to pass back and forth across the world division” so that they might communicate the real lessons, the knowledge, the Golden Fleece, back to Earth (Campbell 229). Valentine sends back long volumes of history written as Demosthenes, while Ender also takes to writing. “The book that Ender wrote was not long, but in it was all the good and all the evil that the hive-queen knew. And he signed it, not with his name, but with a title: SPEAKER FOR THE DEAD. On Earth, the book was published quietly, and quietly it passed from hand to hand, until it was hard to believe that anyone on Earth might not have read it” (Card 355). In a way, this book allows him to successful relay the knowledge of his travels for his writing triggers the start of a new religion and a deeper respect and understanding for the passing of life which is something that he’s wrestled with from the beginning of the novel; the inescapable necessity of death. “’I killed them all, didn’t I?’ Ender asked […] ‘All their queens. So I killed all their children, all of everything’” and Mazer replies: “‘They decided that when they attacked us. It wasn’t your fault. It’s what had to happen’” (Card 328). It is the lesson of the hero’s journey, the lesson for the reader, and the lesson that Ender teaches through the ansible. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the lesson is described thusly: “The battlefield is symbolic of the field of life, where every creature lives on the death of another” (Campbell 238).
The hero’s journey is never an easy one. It is stressful and dangerous for the characters and sometimes just as aggravating for the author. But it is through such archetypes as found in the classic myth-adventure that creativity is allowed to flourish. Card embraced this cycle and created a compelling story the pushed the boundaries of the hero’s youth, his accomplishments, his relationships, and the imparting of his knowledge. It is all there, from the call to the return no matter how unconventionally it is portrayed. This how an author gives eternal life to their novel and forces the audience to take note, by adding it to the collective of amazing journeys that the human subconscious has clung to since the beginning of time.
Works Cited:
- Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1972. Print.
- Card, Orson Scott. Ender's Game / Ender # 1. New York, NY: T. Doherty Associates, 1985. Print.
