Peter and Valentine Wiggin Quotes

Adults may have clumsy, fat hands (see the first quote – we’re not just saying that to insult ourselves), but children have some problems, too. For one thing, as Val makes clear here, no one takes children’s ideas seriously. Peter has a solution for that, which is to hide their ages online. What’s curious here is that children have problems, but they can find ways to get around those. Can the adults? Well, sure: they can manipulate and use the kids.

Peter is the most manipulative of the Wiggin kids. Or is he? Maybe he’s merely the most open about it. Here he is, planning with Val about how they should manipulate the world. In this case, his form of manipulation will be almost entirely verbal. (By contrast, the school teachers try to manipulate Ender through a number of techniques, such as isolation.) Peter and Val are useful for us because they talk a lot about their plans for manipulation (so we can see exactly how they plan to do it); and also because they demonstrate that manipulation is not totally about Ender. (See also 9.37 and 9.63.)

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 is probably the most isolated character in the book, but since the Wiggin kids are so similar in other ways, what about isolation? Here Peter is telling Val that his urge to control was so overpowering that he couldn’t really connect with his brother and sister. Don’t get us wrong – Peter really seems like a monster at the beginning. But it’s interesting to think that, in some ways, he might be just as isolated as Ender.

Almost all of the competition in <em>Ender’s Game</em> is between the kids at Battle School. (Or, if you prefer, between Ender and the teachers at Battle School.) But before that, the kids were competing to get into Battle School. Peter was rejected when he was five and he’s angry that Ender got even a little bit closer. For Peter, that’s a judgment on him – it’s not just that Ender does better on the tests, but that Ender <em>is</em> better.

This is Peter’s view of the world and the opportunity that’s about to open with the end of the bugger war. According to Peter, there’s competition all over– it’s not just about who gets into the Battle School and performs best in the war. According to Peter, democracy is also a competitive field that allows the best person to rise to the top. And Peter sees himself as that man.

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.

OK, we’re kind of being big old softies here: instead of quoting the times when Peter fights or threatens Ender, we’ve pulled this one quote where Peter expresses some warmth towards Ender. But that’s just it – this is almost the only time that Peter does this. The rest of the time, Peter reminds Ender that he doesn’t want a little brother. The funny twist here is that Peter says he knows how it feels, so there’s actually is a very important shared feeling between them.

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?

And we’ve come full circle (at least in the quotes we pulled for this theme). If being human means having no full freedom, then… Well, what does it mean? Even if humans are confined by lots of different things – school, army, society, family, genetics, feelings – that doesn't mean all of those things are equal. (As in, school can limit your options and your genetics can limit your options, but they don’t limit your options the same ways.) So, Ender can’t escape who he is and can’t escape his memories, but he can leave Earth and go somewhere where he might be free to do other things. According to Val, even if you’re not in total control of your own life, you have some freedom to choose among the options that are open to you. Maybe this is what goes wrong for Ender: he has total freedom and doesn’t know what to do with it. Whereas if he recognized that he had a few options to choose from, he would’ve been able to decide more easily.