Q1 Journal 4

For my last journal, I decided to record my experiences of The Circle’s ending.  By this time, I had completely lost track of how long it took me to read the last forty or so pages in the middle of the night.  Up to this point, Mae has acquired a camera that hangs from her neck at all waking moments, Mercer has committed suicide after Mae tested an invention that tracks people down on him, and Annie has undergone a total breakdown after completely unveiling her parents’ and ancestors’ terrible past through a new invention.  Even after all of these events happen to her loved ones, Mae continues to work for and support the Circle.  Any reasonable person including me would have quit by this time after seeing all the damage done.  The ending begins when Stenton, a Wise Man, decides to combine seahorses, an octopus, and a shark in one tank to create something close to a real environment in the ocean.  Bailey, the second Wise Man, is present as well, and he introduces Mae to the final Wise Man, Ty.  However, Eggers throws in his biggest plot twist yet, the revelation to Mae that Ty is actually Kalden, the mysterious man who looked at her work before.  I did not expect this at all, but as I thought of his actions throughout the story, everything clicked into place about how he knew old names as well as what the Wise Men liked to see.  Obviously, since this scene happens near the ending, it must have serious symbolic meaning.  First in the tank enters the seahorse and his many offspring, both of which probably represent the masses of people in the world.  Next enters the octopus, which wants to “know all, touch all,” but not in a disturbing way.  The octopus possibly symbolizes the Internet before corruption, and it lived in peaceful coexistence with the seahorses.  They are oblivious of the disaster that would happen next.  Bailey even comments the following: “Look at these happy creatures.  A peaceable kingdom.  Seems almost a shame to change it in any way.”  The world as it is before the shark is introduced is perfect if they change nothing else.  Finally, however, the aquarium’s caretaker drops the shark into the tank.  The shark gobbles up the octopus and the seahorses within seconds and turned it into ash.  This animal dramatically represents the Circle, a trust that wishes to control every aspect of human life in every part of the world.  It lays waste to everything in its path, and any opposition to it has no chance of success.  Bailey and the reader are horrified, Ty looks as if he expected it, and Stenton is fascinated and proud of the creature.  This reveals that left unattended, the Circle will consume everything for the worse of society, destroying the peace that once was present.

After this, Ty/Kalden jams Mae’s camera transmission, and they meet in an underground area.  Ty warns Mae one last time to speak out against the imminent “Completion” of the Circle, the tracking of a person from birth to death.  He becomes another voice of reason to Mae, the final warning sign that the Circle is truly doing something wrong.  It is hard to believe that even after this, Mae doesn’t believe the person who started the company that is about to take over the world.  In the end, she tells the entire world what Ty had said, but then she covers for herself by saying that she had feigned cooperation with him.  With this action, Mae proves herself to be a coward who continues to flow with the popular opinion that Completion is good even though it is not right and though her loved ones were suffering from it.  This ending completely surprised me because I expected better of Mae.  Most protagonists in dystopian novels like these would have taken action at this point.  Unfortunately, she, who as I had previously stated represents a common person in our world, completely immerses herself into the culture of no privacy.  The ending is still appropriate though disappointing because it leaves a cautionary note to all readers of what might happen if we give up our privacy completely.  This book’s implications on how we as a society are acting to indirectly create a similar future does nothing less than blow me away.

Q1 Journal 3

Since I simply could not put my book down, I continued even more of The Circle by Dave Eggers.  In about a half hour, I read twenty-six more pages.  This section starts after a successful date with Francis, and the two sit together in front of an auditorium listening to another presentation.  The presenter shows off his new dating invention, and to Mae’s horror, Francis volunteers to test it.  With this system, Francis and the presenter demonstrate that it can find anything about a potential date, Mae in this case, ranging from allergies to food preferences.  Mae understandably runs off and refuses to talk to Francis, which is what I would do in this situation.  This is Mae’s first raw experience of the utter invasiveness of the Circle’s technology.  Shockingly, however, she was not annoyed by the violation of privacy but rather by the fact that Francis did not simply ask her about these preferences and that the profile was incomplete.

Later that afternoon, she drives back to her parents’ home because her father had had a seizure the night before.  This later turns out to be a false alarm, but Eggers takes this opportunity to introduce us to Mae’s ex-boyfriend from college, Mercer, who had helped transport Mae’s father to the hospital.  He is a social foil to Mae in that he does not care one bit for social media or any of that technology.  They get into an argument in which Mercer calls basically all of the Circle’s social media and new inventions childish and dorky.  He rants on page 131, “You can ask me!  Actually ask me.  You know how weird that is, that you, my friend and ex-girlfriend, gets her information about me from some random person who’s never met me?  And then I have to sit across from you and it’s like we’re looking at each other through this strange fog.”  This beautifully explains how people in Mae’s time, which is very similar to ours, has become so overly obsessed with social media that they value the gossiping with random people more than consulting an actual person.  He then mocks the like and dislike system, known as smiles and frowns in the story, by saying that it is something that only middle school children would be expected to do.  It makes me wonder how badly we have distorted our communication with each other through the gossip that runs around our social networks and our thirst for affirmation from our peers.  Mae, on the other hand, can only think of benefits of social networking.  By the end of this conversation, Mae and Mercer find each other repulsive because of their differing ideas.  Now that I have met Mercer, I have begun to see him as a voice of reason whom we will likely see later on to provide even more insights into how the novel’s world and our society have made fools of themselves through technology.  This greatly develops a man vs. society conflict throughout the novel between humanity and the technological world of fancy gadgets and electronic communication.

The next day, when Mae goes kayaking for the second time in the novel, she finds that the rental company had digitized their system.  I immediately groaned because I predicted at that moment that the new technology would end up ruining this safe haven at some point.  When Mae returns to work the next Monday, she finds out that everyone is disappointed that she could not attend parties that happened over the weekend.  Again, the Circle sucks Mae back into the frenzied world of social obsession, and she loses herself again in her work.  By this time, she has virtually forgotten about her argument with Mercer just as life moves on relentlessly.  In this section, I became very interested in Mae’s conversation with Mercer because I now see the conflicting ideas of society that emerge in this book.  After this, I could not wait to read even more.

Q1 Journal 2

When I finally found the time to read again, I continued more of The Circle by Dave Eggers.  I read forty-five pages within an hour because the book had become very interesting.  Eggers begins this section by introducing us to Mae’s parents who are overjoyed with Mae’s new job.  Mae’s father has an unpredictable, disabling disease known as multiple sclerosis (MS), and her mother is stuck in battles with insurance companies, trying to make sure that her husband continues to have coverage with them.  Of course, this reminded me of what I read about diseases in summer reading.  When applying MS to the disease chapter (Chapter 23) of Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature like a Professor, I tried to see how MS would fit into the four main criteria of literary diseases.  It certainly looks better than other diseases mentioned in that book, and though it probably isn’t considered picturesque, MS certainly emphasizes the frailty of Mae’s father.  MS is still mysterious in origin, and it likely has symbolic possibilities that can be revealed in the future.

Later that day, Mae decides to go kayaking as a way to relax from the week’s stresses.  Everything in this scene seems peaceful and beautiful in a different way from the Circle’s campus.  She and the reader find pleasure with the simplest glittering pieces of seaweed and the seals that poke their heads out of the water.  Unlike the Circle where everything is human-made and technologically advanced, everything around her except the boats is naturally beautiful.  She finds peace in the bay, which is away from all worldly distractions.  This is the only part of the novel so far that seems incorruptibly perfect and removed from everything else.

When Mae shows up at work on her second Monday, she runs into a man named Kalden who introduces himself and takes a few minutes to watch her work.  As I read further about him in this section, he seemed more and more mysterious and clearly not normal as the two continued to converse.  He refers to Mae’s job title by its old name, and he seems to know much about what the Wise Men like.  The entire experience made Mae and the reader feel awkward and uncomfortable because it raises questions such as “Who is he?” and “Does he even work here?”  After he leaves, another worker named Gina, slightly annoyed that Mae had not done this earlier, appears to help her set up the Circle’s social network on her devices.  As she assists Mae, she stresses the importance of community at the Circle: “If you visit a coworker’s page and write something on the wall, that’s a positive thing.  That’s an act of community.  An act of reaching out.  And of course I don’t have to tell you that this company exists because of the social media you consider ‘extracurricular.’”  To me, this is the second warning sign about the Circle’s gradual invasiveness in people’s lives.  I do not identify with the Circle’s seeing participation in social media as an almost required activity, especially since I myself am not very active in sites such as Facebook (which, by the way, the Circle bought a while ago).  They value social media so much that they are hurt when Mae doesn’t respond to an invitation to a gathering and requiring that they meet up with her so that she can apologize.  This is where I simply roll my eyes and think that these people are idiots.   This part of the story again relates to the theme of privacy vs. transparency because the Circle basically makes participation in social media compulsory.  The company compels its workers to put themselves out in the open when these workers sometimes do not wish to share everything they do.  I was satisfied with this section of the book, and all of my questions and initial reactions kept me wishing for more.

Q1 Journal 1

The first time I read this quarter for pleasure, I began The Circle by Dave Eggers.  I read about seventy pages in around the first two hours, though I’m not sure exactly how much time it took because I stopped checking the time after immersing myself into the book.  The story first introduces the reader to the protagonist, Mae, a new worker at a company called the Circle who had a college roommate named Annie who already worked there.  Mae is simply a woman who had previously graduated from college and could not find work in anywhere except a utility place.  She seems to represent every one of us, the common people, though her new job gives her great opportunity and promise.  She and the reader are dazzled by how perfect the campus of this company seems, though the perfection, as I predicted as I read, probably implies that something will go terribly wrong in the future.  As Mae tours the campus, Annie plays friendly pranks on her from afar by showing embarrassing pictures of Mae on a big screen and by making a fake workspace for her lined ugly burlap.  Eggers puts the plot on hold for a few pages to reveal a flashback of Mae’s unpleasant experiences at her old job until Annie shows up, apologizes, and takes her around more of the campus.  I was shocked that Annie could have been able to find her high school yearbook picture and perfectly replicate Mae’s old workspace even though they only met in college.  As Annie tours Mae around the office of Bailey, one of the three Wise Men who run the Circle, she explains the history of the company probably more for our benefit than Mae’s.  Again, Eggers halts the plot, but he does this to give more information about the Circle.  It is interesting to see that the three men who run the place are called the Wise Men because it alludes to the Wise Men who were very knowledgeable about the stars and who brought gifts to the baby Jesus.  These men were probably called the Wise Men because they were geniuses and because their work was done to bear “gifts” to the public.  As I read, I learned that the Circle started with an invention called TruYou, a system that merges all of a person’s accounts into one and removes anonymity in the Internet, making everyone accountable for his or her actions online.  Though this has many benefits and I identify with the system’s purpose, I can see flaws in it.  I can think of many ways that multiple accounts could help people, such as when collaborating on something without the powers of editing another person’s posts, and I would be hesitant to give up all of my privacy whenever I post online.  Later that night, Mae attends a party on the campus where she meets a man named Francis, whom I assume would be her love interest throughout the story.  He is currently working on an invention called ChildTrack that shows the location of children at any point in time in order to prevent abductions.  Again, I see problems with this because parents can see their kids’ locations at any time, not just when the children are in danger.  I can see how people could abuse it by following their children’s every move. 

The next day, Mae starts her real work in the Customer Experience department, where we find that she is very good at her job from the start.  I like that the Circle values making their workers sound human as they do their jobs because I would hate asking questions to a robot.  Next, the workers attend a presentation in which Wise Man Bailey introduces a new product, SeeChange, which is basically a tiny hidden camera that can be used to track everything in an area without others noticing.  He makes an adage for this camera:  “All that happens must be known.”  Everyone in that audience is astounded, but I felt a little scared as I read that.  With all of these inventions, the Circle is gradually taking away our right to privacy, and the audience, which represents the public as a whole buys into these ideas.  This is the first clear warning that Eggers is trying to make a point about all of us being a mob that willingly gives up privacy for the sake of security.  This idea seems like it will become a main theme in the novel.  When I ended with that section, I could not wait to find even more time to read and to see how the story develops from there.