Foil

Character Role Analysis

Mae Holland and Annie Allerton

Dark-haired Mae Holland and blonde Annie Allerton have been best friends since college, and the two young women are also foils. At the beginning of the novel, Annie is successful, confident, and on the rise, whereas Mae is a dissatisfied drudge who's been wasting away in a dingy office day after day. By the end of the novel, Mae has supplanted Annie at the Circle and taken her place as the most confident and admired young woman on campus. Mae has stolen Annie's life—in more ways than one—and it doesn't do either one of them any good.

Francis Garaventa and Ty Gospodinov

Mae Holland's romantic interests in The Circle are the ultra accessible Francis Garaventa and the ultra aloof Ty Gospodinov, alias Kalden. These two guys represent opposite poles of a spectrum. Francis—who is available to Mae all the time, any time—is the novel's personification of "empty calorie" social media. He may be ultra accessible, but he brings very little real good into Mae's life. By contrast, Ty may be off the radar most of the time, but he has hidden depths that would be well worth the time it would take to discover them.

Eamon Bailey and Tom Stenton

Eamon Bailey and Tom Stenton were both hired by Ty Gospodinov in the early days of the Circle's growth as a company. Bailey is a granola, and Stenton is a corporate shark. By rights, they should have balanced each other out—which is probably why Ty hired them both in the first place—but the best-laid plans of mice, men, and start-up companies often go sideways. As The Circle's conclusion makes clear, Bailey's misguided idealism is no match for Stenton's insatiable capitalistic appetite.

Mercer Medeiros and Eamon Bailey

Our final pairing may be less obvious, but take a closer look at Mercer Medeiros and Eamon Bailey, and you'll see that they have a lot in common. Mae Holland spends a lot of time throughout The Circle criticizing Mercer's body hair and the few pounds he's added since they were together, but Mercer's body type and physical appearance suggest that he probably looks a lot like Eamon Bailey did 20 years before Mae met him.

Reading Mercer and Bailey as foils is a great way to examine the shortcomings of Bailey's alleged idealism and progressivism. Whereas both men tout environmental values and demonstrate preferences for plain, relatively traditional ways of living, Mercer's commitment to his ideals is far more genuine than Bailey's. More often than not, Bailey's supposedly progressive ideas actually go against environmental ethics, human rights, and the tenets of social justice.

Unfortunately for Mae, she chooses to listen to Bailey, not Mercer.