Joe Blake’s MBTI type is one of the most debated in The Man in the High Castle. Portrayed by Luke Kleintank, Joe is often mistaken for an ISTP because of his quiet, capable demeanor, but a closer look reveals a deeply conflicted ISFP personality type with an Enneagram 6w5 core. His struggle with identity, loyalty, and belonging drives many of his decisions, making him a complex and psychologically rich character to analyze.
ISFP 6w5 Characters
Why is Joe Blake from The Man in the High Castle 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
Joe is on a quest to find out where he belongs and to figure out who he is (where does he belong, and which side is more important to him?). He tries to do what he feels is right, even though it causes him to go against his authority figures. (He disobeys John when saving Juliana Crain‘s life in season one; in season two, he is offended when he finds out he was born from a breeding program, and disagrees with the Nazis betraying his rescuers and blowing them up. It offends him to use brutal tactics, and he only wavers on this point when he has been reconditioned over months of abuse.) His father’s attempts to reconcile with him do not succeed until he can accept the facts of his birth and figure out where he belongs.
He is defined by the absence of his identity/a father figure, so he thinks exploring Nazism can tell him who he is supposed to be. (Fi users build their identity around their personal wounds and what feels “absent.”) Until he decides who he is, he is fluid; softer and more questioning around Juliana, and more rigid and performative with John Smith. He ignores what others tell him to do, in favor of trying to figure things out for himself, like Juliana. They tell him to deliver a shipment; he crawls under the truck, finds the film, and becomes curious about it. John Smith tells him to use Juliana and put a bullet in her head; Joe risks his safety to protect her, becomes fond of her, and tries to save her life multiple times. His argument for saving her is emotional; she helped him out, rather than coming up with a logical reason the Reich needs her alive.
Joe betrays systems for people, particularly Juliana, but also turns around and betrays people to belong. His loyalty is built on whatever feels right to him. He also feels deeply but doesn’t express it openly; he loves Juliana but is reluctant to tell her about it and simply challenges Frank for her. His emotions come out in his actions rather than in his words.
When the bounty hunter is after them, they knock him senseless and run for their lives… leaving him and his gun lying on the floor together. Smith or Inspector Kido would have shot him in the head, getting rid of the problem, but Joe never thinks about it because it would violate his early internal principles. Until he has been brainwashed, he only shoots people who are actively a threat to him, such as after being kidnapped, held for ransom, and not being given the film he paid a lot of money to receive. He accepts Juliana has to do what she “must” when he realizes she intends to betray him to his death, but does not retaliate out of love for her.
He may come across as stoic, but he constantly gets emotionally involved with everyone around him… with Juliana, in his argument with Frank Frink, then later with the Nazi youth who share his parentage. It’s only after he has explored his options that his identity becomes settled, and he choose a side to truly fight for, after early waffling.
Extraverted Sensing
His contrast with Juliana when they meet in the Neutral Zone wonderfully illustrates the difference between an INFP’s idealism (her) and an ISFP’s pragmatism (him). Joe knows how dangerous the situation is; she underestimates it. He is good at taking tactical risks; she flounders around and gets into trouble. He saves her life several times and stages her “death” to get someone off her trail; he offers to search a dead body and sinks it into the river to hide it, while she is emotionally affected by it. He tells her to get on the bus and go home, that her desire to find the Man in the High Castle is absurd, but then goes along with her to make sure she is safe.
He and Juliana build a bond by doing things together, physical tasks, risks, and activities that bring them a sense of shared experiences, physical closeness, and that grounds him in the risks they are both under. He also notices things that others miss, such as how the air smells (the burning of bodies). He doesn’t seem to ‘decide’ things, so much as they happen to him; suddenly, he cares and wants to act.
Elsewhere, he shows risk-taking, opportunistic behaviors and thinking fast on his feet; breaking into John Smith’s office and searching it, with the family only a few feet away. Grabbing someone’s gun from their belt and shooting them. Kicking a fan out of the wall and using that as an escape hatch. He gets into scuffles, confrontations, gets arrested at clubs, and punches people in the face.
Introverted Intuition
His gut tells him there’s more to the films than first appears, and that Juliana is important; it clues him into her true motivations late in their arc, which enables him to recognize what is actually going on … maybe too late. He latches onto her and to the films as a narrow, intermittent insight, but also questions them; they cannot be real because he has seen the real world and that is not what happened (Se overriding Ni).
SPOILER. That he became a true and devoted Nazi speaks to his lower desire to have a greater vision for the future and a larger purpose in his life. He becomes fixated on creating a new future, devoid of the old ideas of the past, and wanting to move toward it. He feels joining the Reigh gives his life a purposeful direction. When he finally decides this is what he wants for his life, he doesn’t waver, refuses to reconsider his own thinking, and winds up dead.
Extraverted Thinking
Joe is better at detached thinking than Juliana under stress, because he’s less in touch with a need to be true to his ethics if it costs him his life. His Se gives him more of an understanding of how the real world works, and what he has to do to get along in it, which includes telling Smith about traitors to divert suspicion off of himself, going along with schemes that he may not fully support, and agreeing that sacrifices need to be made for the greater good of the Third Reich.
But he also uses other people’s logical frameworks to decide (authority figures, the Reich’s beliefs) rather than create his own structure. He routinely acts on impulses first, then explains his reasoning later if questioned about it, which is him trying to clean up after himself to his superiors. He is sometimes irrational and inefficient, or derailed by emotion, because he can’t separate the two.
The Enneagram 6
“Where do I belong? Who has my back? Where do I fit?” Those are the questions Joe is mulling over as he tries to find a place for himself in an uncertain world. He offers security to Juliana, hoping she can return the favor, and is upset when she intends to betray him to the Resistance. He went out on a limb for her, several times, and this is how she repays him, with a bullet to the head?
He wants to belong, but also doesn’t trust anyone. Joe also shows counter-phobic 6 behaviors in that he constantly runs toward danger, takes risks, and proves to himself that he is not afraid. But his motives are all to find out what’s really going on, and whether he can trust Smith, the Reigh, his parentage, and his new friends. He is both obedient to his superiors and defiant, in that he does what they told him not to do.
Joe is trying to figure things out along the way and trying to be strategic, despite his impulsive behaviors. He cautions Juliana several times, saying that what she is doing is a needless risk, that she should not be so intent on finding out ‘the truth’ that she places her life in danger… and then like a true and loyal 6, who can’t watch a kitten wander into traffic, he goes along with her into the danger to help her stay alive. He rescues her, covers up her self-defense murder, gets rid of the body, stages her death, lies about her to his superior officer, and tries to cover his trail.
Many times, he seems to be undecided on which side he wants to be on, and as if he is testing both. Joe adapts to those around him to remain safe; he pretends to be devoted to the Cause with no twinge of conscience. But he is also skeptical of the Nazi’s ambitions, what they want from him, and constantly questioning everything, leading him to do his own investigating, to watch films he’s forbidden to look at, and to question whether what Juliana saw on her film is true or not.
The 5 Wing
Joe is very secretive, so much so that even the audience isn’t sure of his genuine motivations or whether to trust him. This is typical of a 5 wing, which plays things close to the chest and does not want to expose itself to ridicule, risk, or to let anyone else know what it is thinking or what it has discovered. It makes him enigmatic. He separates what he feels from what he does often, which makes him appear colder than he actually is.
Joe can also be detached; 5s are competency types who compartmentalize their emotions and rather than just have them, they think about their feelings. He does this when he violates his own conscience or justifies an action he took that has negative consequences for himself or others. He watches for a time before he gets involved in situations where he doesn’t know what is going to happen.
Why Joe Blake is Not an ISTP
I mistyped Joe as an ISTP years ago, when the show first aired on Amazon Prime, because I had such a hard time getting a fix on his motivations. He seemed to have dubious ethics compared to Juliana, which made me push aside Fi sooner than I should have; but upon a rewatch, it’s easier to see where he’s making emotional decisions and coming at his arguments from emotional places, compared to the surrounding thinker characters.
Rather than being strategic, Joe gets involved with people. He cares about them, he saves them, he neglects obvious solutions because they don’t cross his mind from a rational point of view, like killing someone who is chasing them, thus instantly reducing the threat. An ISTP would know that knocking out someone will not stop them, particularly if they are a person who cuts off someone’s finger for identification while they are still alive, murders them and hangs them up from a telephone line to terrorize the locals. But Joe doesn’t kill him. Because… Fi.
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