Dave Eggers’ The Circle simplified
Dave Eggers’ The Circle is a narrative about the life of Mae: a college graduate that got her dream job in the best company she could imagine. Underneath the narrative, Eggers comments on ideas of privacy and social interactions in the digital era through the voice of his protagonist. In particular, Eggers uses ambiguous situations, his protagonist and some minor characters that play crucial role in the novel, well-constructed dialogues and analogies to underscore particular tensions created by the digital age.
After reading the book, one might call the novel dystopian; however, the world Eggers created is not falling apart, it is green and clean. It is a world where people can’t stop sharing their love and…show more content… Mae was innocuous and gained our sympathy easily, but later she annoys us with the same easiness by making irrational and unjustified decisions. She constantly fails to stand up for herself, and then it can be seen that she has nothing to stand up for; she is just shallow. In one scene, Mae wants to improve her PartyRank, a rank that is assigned to you for your social media presence. Mae starts to write meaningful comments, but all her efforts are futile. Then she realizes that the most effective way to improve the rank is just through getting into groups, “smiling” (analogous to liking on Facebook), and befriending random people, that is making yourself more public. The scene mocks the practices we have adopted in real life. However, the culmination of satire is the scene where she decides to steal a kayak when the owner is not around and go kayaking in the middle of night. One of the company’s cameras captures her wrongdoing and although she manages to not get arrested, she invites criticism on herself from her employers and then announces going transparent. Her decision affects her family too: the company installs cameras in her parents’ house, and this unwelcome gesture reminds the Truman show with the difference that they knew about the presence of cameras and eventually started blinding them. Moreover, they could not stand it and fled away from transparency. This chain of events sarcastically shows the inevitable end of our struggle; we will have no privacy in the future. Although Mae’s irrational and bland behavior leaves the reader without any sympathy, it emphasizes the negative aspect of transparency more