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?