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The Circle Extract Extended
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An extended extract of the book The Circle with: - Summary & Analysis by chapter - Themes - symbols - Characters list
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Lernzettel Utopia/Dystopia (and utopian/dystopian aspects of real life) Abitur
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Englisch Abiturzusammenfassung Utopia / Dytopia ( the circle )
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The Circle (by Dave Eggers) - Bookreport
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By: twanbathoorn2007 • 8 months ago
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Content preview
The Circle:Extract 5vwo
,Summary & Analysis (in parts):
Book 1 Part 1
Mae Holland has just arrived for her first day of work at the Circle: “the most influential
company in the world.” The campus, located somewhere in California, is vast, including
everything from athletic courts to fruit groves, and as Mae walks through it all on her way
from the parking lot to the front hall she reflects on how she was able to get this new and
exciting job.
Mae met Annie in college at Carleton; they roomed together for three semesters and
formed a bond almost at the level of sisterhood. Mae specifically reflects on an incident in
which she came down with the flu and Annie took her to the hospital and then painstakingly
cared for her in the days afterward. Annie was two years older than Mae and had clearer
ambitions. While Mae waffled between undergraduate majors, Annie graduated, got an
MBA from Stanford, and was hired at the Circle. After only 4 years, she rose through the
ranks to the “Gang of 40,” and pulled some strings to secure Mae one of the few and revered
entry job placements at the corporation.
Mae is welcomed by Renata, who gives a tour of the building in lieu of Annie since she is
busy in the Old West. Mae takes a moment to pause on the company’s practice of naming
sections of the campus after historical eras in an effort to make the campus less impersonal.
Renata shows Mae to The Renaissance, the building in which Mae will be working with the
Customer Experience team. After walking by halls of tastefully personalized offices, Renata
shows Mae to a tiny, burlap-walled cubicle replete with an outmoded computer. These awful
working conditions prompt Mae to reminisce on her recent, unfulfilling post-grad years living
and working a 9-5 job at a utility in her hometown. She despised that job, she never got
feedback, wasn't making enough money, hated her boss and after a while she felt too good
for them. She would never go back to that time. Just when her eyes are filling with tears,
Annie speaks, revealing the entire thing has been a joke and joining Renata in showing Mae
around.
After meeting various impassioned Circle employees, Annie and Mae split from Renata, and
Annie takes Mae to a top secret room on campus, the Ochre Library. Before entering, they
look together at a large, awkward painting of the Circle’s three founders, called the “Wise
Men” - Ty Gospodinov, Eamon Bailey, and Tom Stenton. Ty was the originator of the Circle,
originally the Unified Operating System, which at first simply combined all of one’s online
interactions (social media, communication, business transactions, and more) into one online
identity called a TruYou. This led to increased accountability (so-called “trolls” were no
longer able to comment on content without using their personal account with their own
names) and an incredible increase in the trackability of personal data, especially consumer
data. However, as Ty seemed to people aloof and somewhat strange, he joined with Bailey
and Stenton before taking on investors and seeing the company soar.
,In the Ochre Library, Bailey has collected thousands of antique books along with sculptures
and a stained glass ceiling. Annie goes to a specific bookcase and removes a volume that
causes a bookshelf to move inward and reveal a secret room with a pole down through the
floor, which Annie says she can only guess goes to his parking space. Annie then has to
attend a meeting, so she hands off Mae to Josiah and Denise with instructions to not let her
do any work on her first day. They show her around the remainder of the campus, pausing to
discuss the campus dorms available and fully stocked for any Circler who wishes to stay the
night on campus.
That night there is a lavish party on campus, which Annie assures Mae is very normal. Mae
drinks fairly heavily, and on her way to look for more wine she ends up following an
unknown man to a waterfall on the side of the Industrial Revolution. They begin to talk; he
tells her his name is Francis and proceeds to flirt with and offend Mae in equal turn. The two
banter back and forth until Annie comes over to split them up and get Mae on a shuttle
home. Mae falls contentedly asleep in her humble apartment.
Mae returns to the Circle the next day and Renata shows her to her new, real office. Mae
receives a new tablet and phone and is instructed to get rid of her old ones; all of her data is
also backed up into the Cloud almost instantly. Next, Mae meets Dan, her boss, who stresses
the community aspects involved with having a job at the Circle and that this, along with her
role in the Circle as a Customer Experience representative, is what gives the company its
humanity. Dan then calls over Jared, who does her Customer Experience training, teaching
her to respond to customer messages and especially to track customer ratings of her service.
Mae learns quickly and works steadily throughout the week; by Friday she has an aggregate
rating of 97, high for a newbie. At lunch with Annie on Friday she enters a discussion with
two other Circlers about Francis and learns of his dark past - two of his sisters had been
abducted from a foster care home after the death of his parents - that has led him to work in
child security for the Circle. Later that afternoon, Annie and Mae attend a weekly full Circle
meeting called Dream Friday. This week, Eamon Bailey presents a new technology called
SeeChange that allows users to place tiny cameras anywhere they like and share the footage
with others. Bailey demonstrates the effectiveness of this innovation for everyday tasks such
as viewing nature or traffic conditions, but moves on to the importance of these devices in
holding accountable all governments, especially in countries going through revolution or
upheaval. He presents the slogan “All that happens must be known,” calling the time at hand
a “Second Enlightenment.”
That weekend, Mae returns home and her parents gloat over her newfound success. Her
father tires quickly, however, as he has recently been diagnosed with MS, and Mae’s elation
is brought back down to earth by discussing at length her parents’ struggles with health
, insurance. On Sunday she leaves home in the early afternoon and heads for her favorite
kayaking spot, where she rents from a woman named Marion. While out, she discovers a
harbor seal, with whom she exchanges mutually fascinated stares. She kayaks to a far out
shore and once sitting down on the beach she sobs over her father’s condition, eventually
reveling in the feeling of crying and the beauty of the nature around her.
Analysis
Eggers’ initiation of the narrative on Mae’s first day at work allows the reader to be fully
immersed in the spectacular world of the Circle. However, it is not a world entirely hard to
understand for any modern reader, as it utilizes elements of real-world companies,
specifically Google and Apple, to create the image of a lush campus and human-focused
ideals, not to mention the use of the term “Circle” which was popularized through Google’s
social media application Google+. These purposeful parallels allow Eggers to build an
effective and near-dystopian satire throughout the novel, beginning with Mae’s intoxication
under the powerful effects of money, prestige, and attention. The reader can sense the
beginnings of trouble from Mae’s shock at all of her data so quickly being merged with the
Cloud of the Circle as well as her realization that her parents already cannot understand her
specialized jargon.
Eggers sets up Mae's home life as direct opposition to her working conditions - her father's
condition makes her feel vulnerable and out of control, her parents' lives are eaten up by the
inefficient process of dealing with health insurance, and her parents lack an understanding
of what she's doing at work as demonstrated by the fancy pen they give her as a gift. This
foreshadows the distance that will grow between Mae and her parents as she becomes
more enmeshed in and reliant on the fast-moving world of the Circle.
The first night's lavish party demonstrates the careless wealth of the Circle, as when Mae
notes while looking for more wine that it looks as though the buffet has been raided by
animals. Mae's silly drunkenness and childlike flirting with Francis parallels her intoxication
with the campus and employees at the Circle throughout the day.
SeeChange presents the reader with the first example of a kind of technology shown
throughout the book - supposedly benevolent but with the possibility of overreaching the
boundaries of private life. This is driven home by the slogan Eamon Bailey uses, "ALL THAT
HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN." Though this is shown on the screen after an inspiring
presentation about the efficacy of SeeChange for quashing violence in the upheaval of
third-world revolution, the slogan has a ring of dystopian totalitarianism.
Mae’s kayaking trips, the first of which occurs in this section, become a theme throughout
the novel and demonstrate her attachment to a less technology-saturated lifestyle. The look
she exchanges with the seal presents a hyper-awareness of who is watching her in contrast
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