Jake Epping’s MBTI and Enneagram profile in Stephen King’s 11.22.63 reveals a deeply values-driven and emotionally grounded protagonist. Portrayed by James Franco, Jake exemplifies the quiet moral conviction of an ISFP paired with the peace-seeking yet forceful instincts of a 9w8. His journey through time is shaped less by strategy or logic and more by personal ethics, emotional loyalty, and a powerful urge to stop suffering when he sees it, even when doing so risks everything. Jake’s impulsive decisions, fierce protectiveness, and ultimate willingness to let go for the greater good make him one of the most poignant ISFP 9w8 characters in modern television.
ISFP 9w8 Characters
Why is Jake Epping from 11.22.63 an ISFP? Continue reading for my argument using cognitive functions! The headers for each section are clickable, so you can easily access more information about the dominant function and the Enneagram type, or discover more characters who share the type.
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Introverted Feeling
“I just killed two people, and I feel like shit.” Jake is driven by the ethics of the situation. He goes back in time because the person who wanted him to go is now dead, and Jake argued with him before his death, so it’s his way of “fixing” the past and doing one last thing for his friend.
All of his decisions, once he reaches the past, are motivated by his sense of right/wrong in the situation. He’s warned not to mess with time, and that it will push back, but he chooses to intentionally alter time on three separate occasions: the first, because someone wrote a sad story in his class about the Halloween night when his father murdered his sister and mother and “hurt me bad” (causing brain damage), the second, because he falls in love and wants to be with her, and the third, in self-defense when Lee Harvey Oswald tries to kill him, after shooting at Kennedy.
Jake hesitates to hurt people and tries to find nonviolent ways of stopping them; he offers the mother and her two children tickets to another town and a night’s stay in a hotel to get her away from the house on Halloween. He intends to steal Harvey’s gun, so he can’t use it. And he tries to deal with Sadie’s husband by threatening him, only to wind up needing to kill him to protect her life. When he reemerges into 2016 and finds a dystopian hellscape, he reverses time again and considers staying in the past to be with Sadie, but ultimately decides she is better off without him and he has to let time unfold naturally. Jake tracks her down later to find out if she “had a good life, and was happy,” since he genuinely wanted that for her.
Extraverted Sensing
ISFPs use Se to immediately act on what feels right. Jake is incautious when he hops into the past; his friend told him to be careful, drive a nondescript car, find a job, and keep his head down. First thing he does is drop $700 on a fancy ride, then make $100 wager with a bookie at 35 to 1 odds, who then tries to kill him. That teaches him to be more careful, but Jake continues to do whatever he feels like doing, whenever the impulse strikes; he moves to a small town to watch him and ends up killing an abusive husband on Halloween by strangling him to death to protect his family. Then he leaves his car by the side of the road, clues his friend Bill in on being from the future, and works with him to try to stop Oswald.
As soon as he moves to a little town outside of Dallas, Jake falls in love with a married woman attempting to divorce her creep of a husband. They spend the night together, at which point her husband shows up to threaten him. Jake threatens him back, only for her to be kidnapped and almost killed the night he needs to be at a specific location to find out if Oswald is acting alone in his assassination attempts. Jake abandons his mission to go defend her and ends up braining her husband with a poker. Later, he places a lot of small bets with another bookie, is bashed over the head, loses his memory, and winds up confronting Oswald at the last minute. His adventure into the past is full of these moments, where his actions are all about acting on impulse at the moment, being opportunistic, and living for every opportunity that arises, romantic, personal, or emotional.
Introverted Intuition
Jake is trying to piece together what happened with Oswald by following clues in the past, but he doesn’t show much intuition apart from insisting they keep their heads down, try not to draw too much attention, and follow what the physical evidence tells them. He has a singular mission in mind (stop the assassination) and is cautious in how he follows up on it in that he doesn’t know what chain of events his investigation might set in motion—but in all other aspects of his life, he pays almost no attention to the potential repercussions of his actions. He doesn’t realize he is in danger most of the time, misreads situations, underestimates people, he sends Bill to a mental institution temporarily to get him away from Oswald’s wife… and only sees the aftermath when a distraught Bill, after months of electroshock therapy, leaps out a window to his death. His intuition is poor.
Extraverted Thinking
“It doesn’t matter WHY he does it, what matters is IF he does it.” Jake doesn’t care how anything works. It goes back in time? Great. I’ll do that. Once it’s established that the time jump is real, he simply uses it. Bill wants to know all the psychology behind Oswald and his connections and what he could mean by this or that, when they are eavesdropping on him, but Jake dismisses anything that isn’t relevant to the case. He wants to know the truth, and does not ask questions beyond that.
He sucks at being detached. He insists they maintain their distance from other people, then falls in love, gets involved in a family’s life, makes friends with Bill, drags Sadie into the middle of everything, has an affair, gets caught during a cop raid of a brothel, and winds up being booked by the FBI for attempted murder.
Jake looks for temporary solutions and facts to lead up to conclusions, and operates off those beliefs. He doesn’t understand or respect the concept of “time pushing back” against him until he sees the evidence of it, in getting sick, almost being hit by a car, his engine refusing to start, etc.
The Enneagram 9
His baseline state is to be calm, accommodating, and conflict-avoidant. Jake wants things to work out fine and tries to find peaceable solutions to problems rather than get into confrontations (at first). He plays nice, makes friends, refuses to escalate unless it seems worth it. At first, he intends to make no friends and not fall in love and avoid getting into trouble. Later, he quietly deals with problems, first through silence, withdrawing, and not telling the truth, then with more direct action. But he also loses sight of his goal and gets distracted by side quests; he is sensitive to others’ pain and suffering, feels repulsed by them being abused, and has to make it stop happening. Even when people pull guns on him, he tries to talk them down, reassure them, and hesitates with indecision, not knowing what to do. The minute others push back who seem sensitive, he de-escalates his anger and becomes subdued again (especially around kids).
The 8 Wing
When conversation fails, Jake takes action. He gets MAD. Assertive. In your face. He kicks down a door, flashes around a fake FBI badge, and yells at people to return their stolen property. He charges into a house where a man is attacking his wife with an ax and jumps on him, punches him, and strangles him. He uses what he knows about a man’s weird sexual fetishes to catch him off guard, then threatens him with exposure unless he backs off and divorces his wife. Many times he tells people, “I WILL kill you,” and they believe it because of the insane look in his eyes. Though initially unsure of how to deal with a psycho who has cut up his wife’s face, Jake recovers enough to throw acid in his face and bludgeon him with a poker. He has a hot temper that escalates whenever anyone pushes him around; he comes alive and pushes back. Hard.
