I have finished Ender's Shadow and am now moving on to my second book, Speaker for the Dead.

Bean has helped Ender to destroy the evil alien race and is now contemplating the imminent war that is soon to follow on earth when the "Buggers" are no longer a threat.

Orson Scott Card doesn't use symbolism. Plain and simple. All those flashy descriptions and mental pictures of visual perception are nonexistent. Instead, he fills that large spacial gap in writing with detailed maps of the human mental processes. These processes, given the extreme intelligence of the majority of characters in these books, point to future plot development more directly without the use of symbols, just by illustrating the power of deductive reasoning. This in itself, the power of the mind, could be a great theme for a paper if it continues in the second book.

I could definitely see writing a paper with this thesis: "Card's lack of symbolism in his work opens up a large amount of open space in his writing which he chooses to fill with elements of characters that are more important to the plot and contribute more to the story than symbolism ever could."

I hate symbolism and the lack of it is refreshing.