Ender's Game III - Weighty Matters

I was struck by the physical changes to Col. Graff over the course of the story -- it seems a little unusual for a character in a novel to start at an apparently normal weight, balloon up to grossly overweight under one kind of stress, and then waste away under another kind of stress.

(By way of contrast, hobbits lose weight on strenuous adventures, and presumably fill back up again on their return, like Bilbo does -- but that feels very different.  And I think in most books, fat characters stay fat, while thin characters stay thin; this is certainly true for Harry Potter's relatives!)

I thought it was interesting to see so much emphasis on Graff's weight in a story that involves characters learning to cope with weightlessness in their battle training.

We initially see the weight gain in chapters 10 and 11 through Ender's eyes:
- Graff looks "fatter and wearier than the last time Ender had seen him" (ch 10)
- Ender thinks of him as "Fat and sour and unfeeling" (ch 10)
-Graff's "belly spilled over both armrests now, even when he sat upright.  Ender tried to remember. Graff hadn't seemed particularly fat at all when Ender first met him, only four years ago.  Time and tension were not being kind to the administrator of the Battle School." (ch 11)

It comes up again in chapter 13 (Valentine doesn't recognize the bloated Graff in civilian clothes) and chapter 14, where we are given Graff's explanation for it:

Admiral C: "A non-materialist.  And yet you are unpleasantly fat.  A gluttonous ascetic? Such a contradiction."
Graff: When I'm tense, I eat.  Whereas when you're tense, you spout solid waste." (ch. 14)

But there's an irony there - the "tension" that causes Graff to gain weight is almost certainly due to his "not being kind" to Ender.  Surely it's because Graff is not entirely "unfeeling" that he grows fat; he seems to be trying to console himself or blunt his own self-loathing with food.

Finally, in chapter 15, the stress of the trial causes Graff to lose weight:

Admiral C: "You've lost weight."
Graff: "One kind of stress puts it on, another takes it off. I am a creature of chemicals." (ch 15)

Implausibly, Graff claims that the experience of being tried was "Not really [hard].  I knew I'd be acquitted."

* * *

In any event, Graff's shifting weight seems to be, at a minimum, another example of monstrousness, a literal and physical byproduct of Graff's effort to suppress his own humanity.