young ender is not a reliable narrator with respect to his own emotions and behavior.
one illustrative example is the beginning of ender in exile where he repeatedly lies both to himself and to the reader. over and over he says stuff like “i'm feeling great, i'm feeling better than ever, my thoughts and behavior are entirely rational” and what's actually happening is he's given the cold shoulder to his old friends he used to love; he had a mental breakdown so severe his friends still worry he's crazy; a bunch of psychologists performed extensive tests and ruled him “too fragile” to watch graff’s court martial; he says things like “he couldn’t pretend […] that he had a future” and “I don’t even live in my body. Just in my mind”; he's obsessing over the humans he murdered and he's spending hours looking at dead Formic bodies to the exclusion of other activities, etc., etc.… The first time I read EIE I totally bought into his literal words and so I was like wow he's coping with all this remarkably well :) and it was only after a while that I was like… wait a sec…
and then, the more I thought about it, the more I realize that even though i always thought of him as a rather dull emotionless guy, ender actually has plenty of moments where he gets emotional, but the narration has a variety of techniques to ignore or downplay it.
for example, the narration shies away from ender whenever he experiences strong emotion, sometimes even jumping from ender’s head to another character’s. here’s the best example I can think of: after ender kills bonzo in the bathroom, dink takes him back to his room, and at the very moment when ender’s emotions overflow and he begins to cry, the perspective shifts from ender to dink. dink! the most random character! (no offense dink fans.) we never get a dink pov before or since! the narration jumps out of ender's body and the reader just watches him cry through dink’s eyes (“lying on his back, still soaking wet with sweat and water, he gasped his sobs…”)
other examples are the moments when he invites bean into his confidance or hangs out with valentine at the lake house.
during moments when ender's perspective is unavoidable, the narrative finds other ways to deemphasize his emotions. when he gets panic attacks from the mind game, the descriptors focus on his physical state — “trembling”, “shaking,” “sweating” — the kind of thing an observer might notice, rather than ender's own internal subjective experience. at the end, his mental breakdown consists of himself passing out, rather than, I don’t know, reflecting or contemporaneously confronting his problem. he would literally rather go comatose than express strong emotion.
this isn't a criticism of ender or of the writer — in fact I think it makes sense for this character to be used to hiding his emotions, even from himself. (he explicitly acknowledges and thanks peter for this trait, showing pretty clearly where it came from: “you taught me how to hide anything I felt.”)
but it means we never get anywhere close to a neutral perspective on ender. not from himself or from anyone else. his siblings think of him more as an idea or a symbol than a person. to bean, ender is almost like a divine figure (ender’s touch “was like the touch of the finger of God. It sent light all through him.” insane thing to say.), and accordingly as bean becomes more affectionate toward ender he grows more distant from ender. graff & co always has it in their best interests to misrepresent ender, so we can't count on them to provide an objective analysis.
I get the sense that ender is hard for other characters to get a read on. (bean boasts to graff: “I know how to listen to ender.”) but he’s also hard to for the reader to get a read on. maybe the reason why ender feels hollow as a character to so many people is because we never see him from the perspective of someone who views him as a whole person.
in quantum mechanics a particle has qualities that are fundamentally unknowable; it exists in a fuzzy, uncertain sort of state. this is how the character of ender feels to me — fuzzy, uncertain, profoundly unknowable.
thanks to @/ndrew-ender-wiggin and @/shxdowcxt55 for discussing this with me <3
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