Evolution And Revelation Of Bean’s Character In Ender’s Shadow

7 Pages 1670 Words

In his book Ender’s Shadow, Orson Scott Card uses a kind of evolutional narrative structure to present the main character Bean through his struggles of survival and development. His character is unfolded to the reader as the story advances through his adventures in life. Different aspects of his character are explored as he is put in different situations in life by the author. Throughout the book Bean grows up from a abandoned child to a normal person.
In the first part of the book Bean is a child living in the streets of Rotterdam, where many children are struggling to survive. There is a scarcity of food and since he is very small and skinny it is even harder for him to survive. At this point the author presents his intelligence as his main attribute which helps him to survive. Poke, a leader of a crew, which was made up of a group of children who shared the food they found, joined him to the crew. Bean was much smarter than the other children, which is why he was still alive in this Darwinian environment.
“The reason all these kids handled everything so stupidly was because they were stupid. They were stupid and he was smart. So why was he starving to death while these kids were alive? That was when he decided to act. That was when he picked Poke as his crew boss.” ( Card, 26)
At this point his intelligence was completely oriented to help him stay alive. When he found a shelter in this crew he started getting closer to the crew boss by acting as her adviser. He advises her to kill a bully, who were older children taking the food from the little ones, in order to gain respect from the other bullies. Although the bully they decided to attack called Achilles had a gimp leg he turned out to be a smart one and survived due to Poke’s compassion. Moreover, he joins the crew as a new member. In this part Bean is presented as a hard rationalist because he advised Poke to kill him because he did not believe him. By the third chap...