Ender's Game II - Peter as Hegemon

One of the things Dr. Olsen hinted about last week (when talking about the imagery of the mind games and Ender's horror of "being like Peter"), was that we would see what we think of Peter by the end of the story.  Here are my own initial thoughts on the issue.

In Chapter 15, Valentine tells Ender that half the Hegemon's Council "does just what Peter wants," and "[t]he ones that aren't Locke's lapdogs are under his thumb in other ways."  In other words, "Earth belongs to Peter."

She also says: "I showed Peter all the evidence that I had assembled, enough to prove in the eyes of the public that he was a psychotic killer.  It included full-color pictures of tortured squirrels and some of the monitor videos of the way he treated you. ... [B]y the time he saw it, he was willing to give me what I wanted.  What I wanted was your freedom and mine."

But the fact that Peter is vulnerable to Valentine's threatened exposé of Peter's cruel and violent past suggests to me that he must have left his sadistic ways behind.  If he were currently indulging those impulses as he had in the past, he could not hope to conceal them for long.  This opens the possibility -- only a possibility at this point -- that Peter has in fact, reformed his behavior,  that he has actually "decided to be a statesman" for real.  To me, it opens the tantalizing possibility that maybe (just maybe) Ender and Valentine were not entirely correct in their assessment of Peter.

Then, we are told, after many years, the only famous name the colonists know from earth is "that of Peter Wiggin, the Hegemon of Earth; the only news that came was news of peace, of prosperity..."  And when Peter is "seventy-seven years old with a failing heart," he pours out "the story of his days and years, his crimes and his kindnesses," to Ender.

With these final pieces of information, I can't help thinking that while Peter may still be, in his heart, a psychopath, he is one who has learned to act convincingly like a human being in order to obtain and maintain power.  And if so, must we judge him by the secret desires of his heart which he has learned to control and possibly sublimate?  Or may we judge him by his actions, by the counterfeit which he has so thoroughly assimilated that he now has kindnesses, as well as crimes, to confess to his brother.

What should we think of a dictator who apparently could be brought down by Valentine's evidence of his now-abandoned childhood sadism, and who is apparently responsible for humanity's unprecedented more-than-global peace and prosperity?

And what are we to make of that comment, that Peter was "seventy-seven years old with a failing heart"?  It could mean nothing more than the literal sense: i.e., Peter is literally getting old and experiencing cardiac troubles.  But that specific phrase is evocative to me; it calls for our sympathy and forces our attention on Peter's heart as well as his failing health.  And the reference to Peter's kindnesses follows just two sentences later.

I believe these clues are deliberately ambiguous, to bring us all the way from unswerving horror at Peter's monstrousness in the initial chapters, to a place where we can ask (but not really answer) precisely these kinds of questions about the extent and nature of Peter's moral rehabilitation.  If any.

* * *

Of course, nothing is entirely straightforward here!

At the very start of chapter 15, Graff says, "even Demosthenes' mob of political cretins couldn't persuade the Hegemon to bring Ender back to Earth.  Ender is far too dangerous."

Whereas, according to Valentine, "Peter wanted Ender back on Earth, under the protection of the Hegemon's Council;" she believes that is her clever maneuvering that got her and Ender out from under Peter's control -- and I have relied on that assumption as the basis for my argument above.

If Graff is correct, however, Peter may only have pretended to be blackmailed into letting his siblings go... because he did not want them in his way. And that would have tremendously different implications for his character and conduct as Hegemon.