Mbti type: ESTP

(Se-Ti-Fe-Ni)

Temperament: Choleric-Sanguine, Always In Charge and Directing

Notes: a lot of the typing of the characters in this novel are always up to debate. I’ve seen Jack typed as ESTP, ESTJ, ENFJ, ENTJ, and ENTP so yeah. A lot of these are due to his primal actions towards the end of Golding’s novel (I kept wanting to say Goldman, who wrote The Princess Bride as they have similar names). However, I believe Jack is a pretty clear ESTP through and through. Also, unlike my last three ESTPs, he’s an antagonist (and male).

Jack is charismatic and has always been in charge in the scheme of things (E); he is one with the island and uses it to physically to navigate and ascend to leadership (S); he is always objective and detached and likes to create conflict (T); he is probably the most adaptive of the boys overall and loves the freedom involved in it (P). 

Dominant Function: Extroverted Sensing

I don’t know why people doubt Jack’s Se, but he just leaks of it. Out of all of the boys in the island, Jack is the first of them to adapt to it. He wants to be the leader of the boys and uses his past as the leader of his choir group as a basis for him to lead, even though that has nothing to do with actual leadership and more to do with his ability to sing. When he loses the election, he gets tasked to supply food and hunt for the boars and that’s when things get interesting. Jack starts to really get into his hunting. He loves the thrill of it, the pleasure of killing things, holding a spear, painting his face (a symbol of shedding his humanity), the power he gets in taking the life of animals. Jack is a pleasure seeker and this is utterly terrifying. Jack loves to experience these moments and it escalates more and more until he elevates up to killing humans, in which he becomes a menace towards the protagonists of this book. Jack is the perfect example of Se gone wrong.

Auxiliary Function: Introverted Thinking

Jack is consistently great at making power plays by going over his analysis of the events Ralph has done on the island versus what he has done. Jack knows that he has found a leverage point against Ralph, which is basically that freedom and no restraints have been more fun and more effective towards the boys as a whole than trying to establish and create a ruleset. Jack likes to walk around the island, exploring it by himself when he needs to. He has an inherent need to study it and study its inhabitants to gain insight. He is then able to physically use this data to lure the other boys into abandoning Ralph’s leadership position and is able to get them on his side. 

Tetriary Function: Extroverted Feeling

Jack shows this at first, in a way during the beginning of Golding’s novel. He is a choir boy and he feels that he can lead through thinking of others rather than himself. He tries to emote on a social structure that’s only in his head (his past leadership as a choirboy). His second emoting happens during his first hunt, where he thinks of the ethical implications for slaughtering that pig, but afterwards, he sees it as an embarrassment and chooses to do so in order to quell any lingering feelings. Because Fe is one of his lower functions, he doesn’t care much for the needs of others and to be generous towards them. He even resorts to torture to get those like Sam and Eric to take his side. 

Inferior Function: Introverted Intuition 

It’s interesting that his lack of Ni is never tested during the key events of the book. It’s never tested because there is no society for him to adhere to…at least not until the very last pages of the book. He likes to play war games and be childish but he overestimates the way the world works. Jack becomes certain that help will never be on the way and that living in the island killing things will forever be the case. He doesn’t look to the future or any of that. The naval officer at the end is able to quickly strip down Jack as a simple boy rather than a leader, which is not what Jack wants to be seen as.