MBTI Type: INFJ
Charlie has full faith in her hunches, which are startlingly accurate; she has spent her day pondering when we first meet her, and musing on that their lives are dull and need to change, which makes her think of her Uncle Charlie – as she finds out, they thought of each other in the exact same moment, and he is coming to see them (the same thing she wanted him to do). She thinks they are identical, alike, that she knows him intimately without even spending much time with him. When he makes a boat out of their father’s newspaper after dinner, she accurately assumes there’s something in the paper he did not want them to see—about him! When men comes to the house to do a ‘survey,’ after spending some time with them, Charlie accurately intuits that they are detectives investigating something. She is determined to find out something “nobody else knows about” her uncle, but doesn’t like it when she does, since it implicates him as a serial killer! Her illusions about him shattered, Charlie then develops an apathetic and negative attitude toward mankind (“I don’t believe in goodness anymore”) that is a vast, sweeping generalizing judgment because someone has let her down. She thinks in terms of others and their feelings above her own, not wanting her uncle to leave because it would hurt her mother, being proud of showing off how handsome he is to all her friends, and being concerned with keeping her parents happy. Charlie is exuberant and emotional, quickly sharing all of her feelings (how glad she is to see her uncle, how sorry she is that they live such mundane lives; how much she hates her mother’s “old hat,” eager to talk to the government men who come to see her, and she even goes out on a date with one of them and quickly falls in love). But when she finds out the truth about her uncle, Charlie also struggles to conceal her suspicions and her true feelings – she becomes distant and blunt, hints that her uncle should leave, and plays an emotional game with him, where she confronts him with her upset feelings and then taunts him by wearing the evidence of his crime in front of him, as a threat to get him out of the house. She asks him how he could do such a thing, because they had such faith in him. Prior to knowing the truth, Charlie saw them as two halves of the same whole, as twins linked by telepathy. She spoke in “we” terms about their need to know things about each other, and share everything. Charlie tries to understand and figure things out for herself, including examining the stairs after she suspects her uncle tried to kill her by causing her to fall down them. She shows some Se impulsiveness and a need to do things immediately; after being unable to read her uncle’s scraps of newspaper, she rushes off to the library before it closes—darting out into traffic and almost getting hit by a car. She dumps her best friend and their plans for the evening to go out on a date instead.
Enneagram: 9w8 so/sp
Charlie starts out as a wildly optimistic but somewhat passive girl, who has spent the day pondering all the things she doesn’t like about their boring life – but then who concludes there’s quite simply nothing she can do about it, in sort of an apathetic acceptance that nothing will ever change. She does decide to send for her uncle, in the assumption that he can shake things up for her. When he arrives, she dreamily wanders about the house, being overcome with joy at his presence, not wanting gifts or anything other than to see her mother’s happiness and feel it (Fe + 9). Charlie tries to keep everything peaceful, proactively – don’t mess with father’s paper, he won’t like it; I told Uncle Charlie no one would bother him and I intend to make sure that doesn’t happen; I need you to abide by his wishes! She trusts people easily and is naïve about their intentions, but also shows a little 6ish distrust and suspicion under stress. More often, though, she leans into her 8 wing. She becomes unable to conceal her true moods, confrontational (heedless of how dangerous this might be), and even aggressive, informing her uncle that if he doesn’t leave at once, “I may kill you myself!”
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