Here Ender is complaining to his sister (during his visit to Earth) about how he’s being manipulated by the adults in his life and has no real options. In other words, he feels like a puppet. Which is exactly what Peter called him in 2.64. Just a coincidence, right? Or maybe we’re meant to draw some comparison between the different manipulators in Ender’s life.

What exactly is Val saying here? She’s trying to comfort Ender by telling him that he’s not a puppet other people's games, he’s actually a player. Is she right? The school administrators’ other quotes (that we pulled here) make us reconsider our attitude towards manipulation: oh, well, if Anderson says that manipulation is good for Ender, maybe he’s right. But here, Val takes another approach. She seems to be saying that we can escape manipulation by…ignoring it? Or leaning into it? This seems like a radically different approach from, say, Dink’s awareness of manipulation.

Ender may be a product of war, and he may be very good at it, but in some ways, he’s also a casualty. Think about it. If Ender loves the enemy, then destroying the enemy is always going to be a little painful. (Or very painful.) This is part of why Ender seems like a sad character in this book: the thing that he’s so great at (war) is painful. (Although the fact that we see Ender’s pain but not the pain of, say, Stilson, does strike us as a little odd. It’s important to remember that Ender isn’t the only casualty of his wars.)

This is Ender’s (correct) guess about the buggers. This hints at Ender’s big wish in his wars: that people would just leave him alone. For instance, he fantasizes about Peter leaving him alone (1.16) and he cries out to Dink that he didn’t want to attack Bonzo and wished that people would just leave him alone (12.122). What’s curious here is that Ender’s personal enemies simply won’t do that, but the buggers really are leaving humans alone.

Is it true to say that Ender hasn’t met people? Isn’t Battle School full of people? And why does the army need to isolate people when those people are these super-genius kids? After all, the army wants Ender to remain creative, but isn’t his creativity helped by his relationships with Alai and Bean? Graff lays out the reason why they do what they do here – and it’s a story we’ve heard before. But we hear it so many times that we can’t help thinking of some problems.

OK, after pointing out that Ender is a dangerous kid when it comes to competing, this part always gets us because he tells Val that it’s not about competition for him. He doesn’t want to compete against Peter – he wants a totally different relationship with his brother. Unfortunately, as we know from the first quote in this section, Ender and Peter’s relationship seems like competition (at least to Peter). But this quote does remind us that there are other ways for people to relate – we don’t have to compete with each other.

While Ender mostly thinks about his failure to form a community with other kids and his family, there’s this one set of relationships that he doesn’t think about so much: his relations with the teachers of the Battle School. Or, rather, when he <em>does</em> think about the teachers, he considers them the enemy. But here Graff’s mask slips slightly and we see his affection for Ender. (It helps that Graff has told others that he’s Ender’s friend and he thinks Ender is a great kid.) Ender and Graff will never be very close, but there’s a sense of a possible relationship here – which Ender is not entirely comfortable with.

In this section, we’ve been thinking about several possible roots for communities. Maybe you can form a community with people who share your hobbies. Or maybe you can only form one with people who treat you as an equal. In this quote, Graff offers maybe the most basic requirement for a community: the people in it are able to communicate with each other. That makes the buggers’ telepathy perhaps the ultimate form of community; instead of having to talk about what they’re feeling or thinking, they simply transmit the feeling or thought: “What one thinks, another can also think; what one remembers, another can also remember” (13.280).

This is Graff’s theory of the species and the individual. What’s important, according to Graff, is that genes live on. Again we get a notion of something like a community – here we have individuals sacrificing themselves for the species, which those individuals can never know in a direct way. Seriously: can you meet all humans? You’d have to have a lot of free time. Yet, even without meeting everyone in the species, Graff seems to think that the species makes some demands on the individual. This sounds a little bit like a community. As you can see, this book covers many different kinds of communities, from the small (the family) to the large (the species).

How do you feel about this? We’ve heard (from Graff) that he really is Ender’s friend. When Ender isn’t in the room, Graff just won’t shut up about how great Ender is. But all this time, Ender has only seen Graff as a manipulative guy. (Why? Because Graff <em>is</em> a manipulative guy.) This seems like one of those rare moments when Ender realizes that Graff is also his friend. But notice that Ender doesn’t totally believe it. We could compare this to the quote above: Bean gets the idea that he and Ender are friends pretty quickly, but Ender resists the idea that he’s friends with Graff. Why?

Ender’s very good at what he does, but this raises a problem for him – because what he does isn’t very nice and it reminds Ender of what Peter would do (there are zero WWPD bracelets, we can assure you). In order to feel less like Peter, Ender comes up with a distinction: I have power because I’m excellent, whereas Peter has power because he’s manipulative. Now, this doesn’t entirely seem convincing to us – after all, Peter is excellent at what he does. (Like figuring out secret troop movements by looking at ordinary train schedules.) Not to mention, Ender can be manipulative, too. (Remember, he starts out being friends with Alai because it’s a way to undermine Bernard’s authority.) In some ways, the fact that Ender is uncomfortable here just shows us one potential downside of being so successful: he’s responsible for what he does to other people.

Val worries that she might be like Peter (let’s get rid of the suspense: she is). But here she realizes that there’s yet another danger: that she might become like Demosthenes, the paranoid, anti-Russian author that she’s pretending to be. In a lot of other books, this would be the big issue of identity, but here, this is a momentary worry. Again, the fact that worry about becoming Demosthenes isn’t a huge deal reminds us how important worrying about Peter is.

Oh, geez. After all that worry – after Val said that Ender and Peter were opposites (9.240) – now Val’s assurance just crumbles. This used to be something that worried Val, yet now she seems fine with it. (See the next quote for a little bit of why.) But one additional curiosity here is that Val gives a reason why the three Wiggin children didn’t get along – a reason that has nothing to do with the fact that Peter’s a violent psychopath (though, hey, that’s usually plenty for us). That raises the possibility that maybe Peter isn’t a violent psychopath. Maybe they just misunderstood each other.

Now, it’s worth asking whether Peter was always a mix of builder and destroyer, or whether he’s been changing from his earlier days, when he seemed mostly to be destroyer. Val doesn’t talk about identities changing, so according to her it seems as if all three Wiggin children have been complicated all along – Peter was never a monster, even though he seemed that way to them at the time; and Ender was never wholly the saint that he appeared to be. Do you agree with that idea of identity? Or do you think maybe Ender and Peter have changed over time?

Here’s Graff giving a slightly more clarified explanation of the first quote in this section. Or is it? In that other quote, Graff told Ender (and us) that individuals aren’t free because of pressure the species puts on us. Here, Graff locates that pressure in our genes. On one hand, there’s definitely some overlap there – genes do get passed down by the species, after all. On the other hand, aren’t genes (in some ways) what make us individuals? We could connect this with Graff’s later comment on about how his body deals with stress in different ways (over-eating, under-eating). Which brings us back to that issue: if we could get free of everything social that was confining us, might we still be confined by our selves?