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.