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.