Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow: Orson Scott Card's Postmodern School Stories

The school story has a long tradition in children's literature. Orson Scott Card dramatically revises and rewrites the tradition in two "school stories in space," Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow. Doyle and Stewart find that Card's innovations in the school story form and his departures from conventional narrative structures are inextricably linked to the need to escape narrowly defined perceptions about narrative, about education, and about the relationships between adults and children. Ultimately and essentially, the novels reconsider what it means to be human, with its attending successes and failures, in a postmodern world.