In Sebastian Faulkes' HumanTraces and Where My Heart Used to Beat, the background information and characters' conversations often sound like the dissertations that are typical of point Five's talk style. Characters at point Five are introverted, mentally active people who dislike having demands placed on them and prefer to examine their emotions in private, after the fact, living self-sufficient lives with plenty of alone time,
Of course, our writer's voice is important; we want readers to recognize us, but not to the point that our characters all sound like us. Note the conversation on p. 158 of Where my
Heart Used to Beat, where Valerian tells Richard how the war wound Richard
hasn’t been able to remember actually occurred:
“. . . There was some fierce rifle and
machine gun fire, and you were keen to go over into the enemy trench . . . there
was a struggle between you and Shenton. He said you’d gone berserk. As you
started to climb out of the trench he shot you through the shoulder . . . He
said it was the only way to save your life.”
There was silence in the study. I pushed my mind back to that shell-holed winter landscape. I didn’t remember being shot from behind, but neither did I not remember . . . There was nothing to rule the story out. Shenton was hard and quick thinking; this kind of thing would not have been beyond him.”
Faulkes is a prolific, highly regarded British novelist with many awards, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and this essay is in no way meant to disparage his talents. We're simply exploring the personalities of his characters, particularly Richard in Where My Heart Used to Beat, and noticing how Richard processed this above information intellectually, completely without reference to his emotions. It’s a gift of characters at point Five to conceptualize and master knowledge, but this high value for intellect tends to dominate the physical and emotional sides of life.
Reviews of another Faulkes novel, Human Traces,
support the possibility that he may have woven a lot of himself into his
characters, at least in the works cited here:
"Overall, despite the novel's many
felicities, I was left feeling that Sebastian Faulks' desire to present complex
ideas and arguments sometimes stretches the fictional form to, if not beyond,
its limits." (Jane Stevenson, "The Way Madness Lies," The
Guardian, September 3, 2005)
". . . a long, encyclopedic novel, sprawling over decades and continents, employing an expansive cast and packing in many themes and theories in the form of didactic digressions: speeches, papers, monologues . . . Faulks sometimes force-feeds his characters' dialogue to convey background information." (Steven Heighton, "Head Cases," New York Times Sunday Book Review, October 15, 2006)
In Dialogue: Techniques and Exercises for Crafting Effective Dialogue, Gloria Kempton
writes that a character at point Five is “the one standing off to the side watching,
observing, taking notes, reading, thinking, and playing mind games . . . In a
scene of dialogue, this character can often seem withdrawn, detached, and even
arrogant. She is definitely an introvert." (p. 90).
This could as well be a description of Lisbeth Salander in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, who particularly demonstrates the degree to which characters illustrating aspects of point Five can be emotionally remote and socially awkward. Of course. her history of enduring abuse has earned her the right to keep her distance from others and to bestow trust only very, very cautiously. Salander’s keen intelligence is reflected in her love of puzzles and her high-level technical sleuthing; she has a photographic memory and calms herself by mentally solving advanced mathematical equations.
In creative nonfiction, Joan Didion stands out for her highly intelligent essays and keen observation of political and social dynamics. Her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking could be a treatise on the difficulty for some at point FIve in dealing with grief. On December 30, 2003, her husband John Gregory Dunne died from a massive coronary event when their only child Quintana had been in tensive care for five nights with pneumonia and septic shock:
“This is a case in which I need more than the words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself” (p. 8).
Of course, she does experience terrible grief:
". . . in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”
Then she retreats again to intellect:
“Virtually everyone who experiences grief mentions this phenomenon of waves . . . Such waves began for me on the morning of December 31, 2003, seven or eight hours after the fact, when I woke alone in the apartment” (p. 27).
Dr. Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris is often cited as an exemplar of point Five personality traits, but we shouldn’t extrapolate that to mean this personality is any more or less likely to slip into madness, only to consider Lecter as somewhat of a caricature of the loss to human potential when completely separating head from heart.
Laurie R. King has a compelling series of detective novels that feature Mary Russell as the reimagined partner (and eventually wife) of Sherlock Holmes. In Dreaming Spies, Mary recalls driving home on a dark rainy night:
“To keep myself awake, I recited mathematical formulae, irregular verbs, and poetry. Haiku was ideal for the purpose, being both mathematical and poetic . . . (p. 11).
Later in the book she and Homes engage in one of their favorite pastimes, quoting Shakespeare to each other (p. 48).
In the transformational arc at point Five these characters learn to live in the present, coming down from a level of abstraction into the ordinary world, with a flow between themselves and others in which they receive more and give more, In this respect, it's of interest that Judith Searle, in The Literary Enneagram, mentions Mary Russell among several "healthy" Eight characters, not Five, and provides a number of quotes from The Beekeeper's Apprentice to make her point. Searle may be right that this character shows more Eight qualities than Five qualities. I'll just note that when a character is healthy, not boxed in so tightly to the unconscious patterns that identify a point on the Enneagram, you'll see positive qualities of all the points.
Also, if you explore how various sources "type" fictional characters, you'll find some disagreement. The point of learning the Enneagram is not so you must create characters that are "perfect" examples of one of the nine points, but simply to explore how you might deepen the descriptions and dialogue of your own characters.
