MBTI Type: ISFJ
Dominant Introverted Sensing—a strong emphasis on memories holding personal significance, meticulous, and detailed: Julien is more grounded, practical, and aware of what is happening in France than Sara, which makes him more attuned to the real-life risks involved in rescuing a Jewish girl and hiding her in their barn. He does not like to take chances and considers how to keep her hidden. Julien attends to all of her practical needs, and tries to give or bring her things that will feel familiar—notebooks to draw in, blankets, to make her a room in the hayloft. He remembers minor details about her life, such as her birthday. He and his parents save up food rations for chocolate to make her a cake. While cautious and meticulous, but he makes fatal errors of judgment when he loses concentration (more on that in the inferior Ne section); one of them is he notices her sketchbook at school in the principal’s office, and steals it to take home to her, incurring the wrath of the Nazi spies at the school.
Auxiliary Extroverted Feeling—ease of emotional expression and shaping their actions around how their decisions affect others: Julien expresses a Fe perspective succinctly when he confronts Sara for being self-absorbed (from his point of view) and tells her the choices she makes affect other people. He naturally thinks about this and takes the impact into his decision-making process; he can’t stand aside and let Sara go to a camp, but he also knows it is a risk to himself and his parents. If the Nazis catch them, they will kill them all. Sara doesn’t think about this, or know about it, until he tells her about it. Julien is compassionate and wants to maintain a good relationship with his family and friends. He ignores offenses against himself and keeps his head down, being polite to those who are mean to him. Julien looks for ways to make Sara happy, despite her being shut up in the barn for over a year. He freely shares his feelings and is articulate in how he expresses them.
Tertiary Introverted Thinking—desires to understand how systems and people work so they can better communicate or figure out how a hack that works: He is logical, good at school, and considers all of his decisions before he makes them. After seeing Sara has escaped, he finds her and takes her through the sewers to evade capture at the school. He realizes he can’t take her into the house, in case their upstairs neighbors see her (his family thinks they might be Nazi spies), so he makes room for her in the barn. He patiently teaches her algebra and is such an outstanding student, he receives honors and a chance at an advanced mathematics class.
Inferior Extroverted Intuition—curious about the future and in distinct possibilities, but skeptical of “unrealistic” ideas and allows others to lead the way there: Julien struggles at first to envision anything other than what he sees in front of him; he finds it hard to imagine Paris, a place he has never been, but after spending a lot of time with Sara, he gradually becomes more imaginative, taking her on safaris and describing vivid places, people, and animals. He is cautious about the unknown and usually careful, but after he takes Sara out into the bluebells on her birthday, the next morning he is so elated that he walks the main road to school, gets captured as a cripple, and shipped off, unfortunately, to his ultimate fate, because he was euphoric, happy about the future, and not paying attention to his environment.
Enneagram: 2w1
Enneagram 2—a warm and caring helper, who focuses on doing all they can for specific chosen others: Julien has no reason to be kind other than that he is a kind person; when Sara leaves her notebook behind in class, he picks it up and brings it to her, even though she calls him cruel names along with the other kids. He saves her from the Nazis, risking his own life, and takes her home to his parents’ barn, where he rearranges things in the loft to make her more comfortable. He does everything in his power to entertain her, befriend her, keep up her hopes, feed her, and even carves her a white bird for her birthday and takes her out into the woods so she can see the blooming bluebells, because he knows how much she loves them. But he also shows his pride, in that after several other kids beat him up, he doesn’t want her to help him. He wishes she had not seen him humiliated like that. He yells at her for being selfish and a burden, for not thinking about other people and their safety, and then doesn’t return to see her for about a week. His mother says that he needs to “heal,” meaning his pride got bruised. He is ashamed that Sara saw him as “weak” and beaten. Part of his anger was at her selfishness in the face of his generosity.
1 wing brings in a gut-driven sense of being right and a desire to help others improve themselves: Julien has a firm sense of right and wrong. He tells her off for being selfish and not thinking about other people and their needs, because he prioritizes that in his life. He has no reason other than duty and a sense of wanting to be a good person to help her, even though his feelings for her grow by being around her. The other boys abuse him and call him names, but Julien never lashes out at them. He just focuses on his lessons. Julien wants her to be serious and attend to her schoolwork faced with her preference for shallower topics such as gossip.
