Colonel Hyrum Graff Quotes

Graff starts to explain why isolation is necessary for Ender’s training (and why Ender didn’t get Val’s letters), but then he stops midway to say that he doesn’t need to defend himself. Which is what people always say when they <em>want</em> to defend themselves. We pulled this quote because in it, Graff nicely explains the positive side of isolation (“the optimum environment for creativity”); but the fact that he wants to defend himself shows that there’s something wrong about purposely isolating a kid. No matter the benefit of isolation, we should recognize the unhappiness it causes.

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.

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).

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.)

Do we trust Graff when he says this? We’ve seen how smart Ender is (see the first quote in this time), so maybe this is just a reminder that Ender is the best at what he does. But when Graff says “stronger,” he’s not talking about physical strength – he’s talking about Ender’s identity. Do you agree with him that Ender has a strong character?

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?

We’re back to non-Ender confinement. Here, Graff is complaining that he doesn’t want people to mess up his finely-tuned system of making Ender unhappy. Graff is the principal of the school – can we even imagine anyone higher up than him? Well, as it so happens, we can: there’s a whole group of people (politicians) who could force Graff to take some actions, and he’s trying to avoid those folks.

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?