Ender's Game

The Giant’s Drink is a challenge in the fantasy game that serves as a motif exploring how Ender navigates games. No other Battle School student has moved beyond the Giant’s Drink, and the only other one to obsess over it took his own life. The game depicts a Giant who presents the player’s avatar with two cups: Ostensibly, one is poison and the other wins the game. Ender chooses poison every time. Ender tries to dismiss the game: “I’m sick of the Giant. It’s a dumb game and I can’t ever win. Whatever I choose is wrong” (46). Nevertheless, he compulsively returns to it, dying each time. Finally—like Ender eventually does with all games—he plays by different rules and overcomes the challenge, though with gruesome results. Ender knocks over the cups and climbs toward the Giant’s face, burrowing into his eye. Afterward, Ender is horrified by his measures: “He hadn’t meant to kill the Giant. This was supposed to be a game. Not a choice between his own grisly death and an even worse murder. I’m a murderer, even when I play” (47). Any time an opponent presents Ender with no good options, Ender finishes the game by destroying his enemy. In Ender’s story, no game exists in which Ender doesn’t play the destroyer.

Ender desperately wants someone to present him with choices other than one’s survival over another, but until the bugger war ends, he cannot abandon his duty without abandoning humanity. In the fantasy game, the Giant erodes into the landscape over time, and Ender never plays the game again. Nevertheless, the moment remains with him throughout his training and interrupts his dreams: “And then [the voices] changed into Valentine and Alai, and in his dream they were burying him, only a hill grew up where they laid his body down, and he dried out and became a home for the buggers, like the Giant was” (201). Far from a nightmare, Ender finds peace in this dream; his loved ones finally lay him to rest, and he becomes a source of life rather than death. Literally, he becomes the enemy, the Giant. Little does Ender realize the buggers observed him through the game and, in turn, come to understand and love him despite being their enemy (as Ender does for them). After the war, Ender makes this dream a reality, traveling the universe in search of a safe, permanent bugger home.