MBTI Type: ESFJ
Dominant Extroverted Feeling – ease of emotional communication and shaping their actions around how their decisions affect others: Bernard is extroverted, warm, and outreaching; he easily makes others feel at home and tries to motivate everyone to work together for everyone’s best interests. When he decides to create a plan to get off the island and get them all rescued, he doesn’t try to do it alone, but to convince others to help him. In this way, he tries to affect the emotional environment all the time, including urging his wife to share his positive feelings (for which she feels resentful). It’s hard for him to think he doesn’t know what’s best for others or to try and change their mood to reflect what he thinks is best for everyone.
Auxiliary Introverted Sensing – working with what exists and their personal history to make an immediate impact: Bernard is practical, down to earth, and learns from his previous experiences; he points out that a plane dropping food means other planes fly across the island, and they need to catch their attention. He is quite keen to ‘get back to our old life’ rather than stay on the island, until Rose tells him that the island has healed her of her cancer, and if she leaves, it might return. Then he changes his mind and foresees his own future with her there forever.
Tertiary Extroverted Intuition – an interest in many different possibilities and in seeing connections between unrelated ideas: Bernard has lots of creative lower Ne in that he is optimistic, good-natured, playful, and funny, open to new ideas and various ways of healing (he seeks out faith healers when the medical establishment can do nothing for his wife).
Inferior Introverted Thinking – critical under stress, can get hung up on the “logic” of things: He rarely questions his own conclusions. It baffles him that the others just accept that food falls from the sky without wondering where it came from, what it means, etc.
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Enneagram: 2w1
Enneagram 2 – a warm and caring helper, who focuses on doing all they can for specific chosen others: Bernard first meets Rose when offering her unsolicited advice about how to get her car out of a snowbank. Rose loves him, but also finds him ‘intrusive’ in his attempts to ‘fix’ her and find a cure for her cancer (which she did not ask him to do); she actually lies to him about the faith healer helping her, so he will relax and enjoy their last few months together rather than desperately trying to save her. Bernard doesn’t like that they are all becoming complacent about living on the island, so he tries to convince everyone to create a giant SOS message in the sand, among other things.
1 wing brings in a gut-driven sense of being right and a desire to help others improve themselves: He is optimistic, cheerful, convinced that only good things are going to happen to them, and ambitious, but can also be critical of others and drive them away by being over-handed (he tells off people for not doing it the way he wants it done, then blames himself for being the only person left to make the SOS sign, because he admits he was too hard on his helpers).
Learn all about your Enneagram type in 9 Kinds of Quirky: The 9 Enneagram Types!
