Talking to Dink later, Ender seems to agree with this idea – he’s a tool meant for a particular job (8.155). If this is true, then manipulation is a perfectly fine way for people to interact. That is, “manipulation” is another word for using a tool for a job, but it sounds bad when we’re talking about people’s relationships because we usually associate that word with telling lies or tricking people. But what if you could manipulate someone without doing anything bad?

Here’s Ender fighting that internal battle with himself. Check out the argument he’s having with himself: I didn’t mean to hurt him… well, yes, I did. And we also see one of the effects of this war: Ender doesn’t like the dangerous, Peter-ish part of himself, so he feels sick when he acts that way. In other words, Ender has lost this little battle against that part of himself, and he’s his own casualty.

This is both the administrators’ plan and their problem: they need someone who will be creative and find new solutions for old problems – so they isolate Ender.  Yet they still need him to be able to deal with people and lead them. If they isolate Ender totally, good-bye social skills. In some ways, this captures the double-edged sword that is isolation: it has its upside (yay, creativity) and its downside (boo, lack of social skills and empathy). As we’ll see some more, this issue is tightly connected to Ender’s education/manipulation.

First, Graff wants Ender isolated from the kids so he doesn’t pick up their thought processes (which, yes, is a little strange, since these kids are supposed to be the super geniuses of the world – not bad folks to copy). Second, he also wants Ender isolated from the adults so Ender doesn’t rely on them. This comes up a bunch of times in the novel. For instance, Graff later says that Ender can’t have anyone who he looks up to as parents (5.16) and that Ender can’t expect help out during the war itself (5.5).

Graff will pretty soon reverse himself on this statement and tell Anderson that he is Ender’s friend (4.98). But as far as Ender knows, this is it – Graff isn’t his bud and, frankly, none of the kids are either. (Especially after Ender broke that one kid’s arm.) But here’s one thing that we know that Ender doesn’t, which is that Graff really is his friend. So, while Ender thinks he’s all alone in the world, we know that he secretly has support.

Ender later says pretty much the same thing to Bean, but here Ender is hearing it from Graff. Ender might have thought that Battle School was a chance to start over and become friends with kids who are as smart as he is. But Graff has other plans: he wants to isolate Ender, and here he says the only way out of that is for Ender to be the best. OK, so being the best isn’t necessarily the best way to make friends, but that’s another issue that Ender will face. (Though it’s interesting that the issue of skill and social position are so connected.)

Most of Ender’s identity problems come from his worry that he’s a bully and a killer, like Peter. But here, Ender wonders for a moment about what it would be like to be “like the other boys.” (We guess he means to wonder what it would be like to be just a regular boy – though we should keep in mind that these “other boys” are also Battle School super-geniuses. Not exactly regular guys.) The fact that Ender only thinks about this here – this one time – shows how Ender is really much more worried about whether he’s going to turn out like Peter.

This is Graff’s take on the limits of human freedom: humans aren’t free, ever, because the species requires individuals to do something. This is pretty early in the book, and Ender pushes back against this idea a little, but how does it affect our reading if one of the book's authority figures declares so early that freedom isn’t totally real?