The Circle Analysis

Tech UtopiaThe Circle is set in the San Francisco Bay Area, in a fictional city called San Vincenzo, which is likely standing in for tech towns around San Francisco and San Jose like Mountain View...

Although The Circle has a third-person narrator, that narrator's perspective is so bound up with Mae Holland's that it's often difficult, if not impossible, to tell the two apart. How and why does...

Ever heard of something called a "Ustopia"? It's a neologism Canadian author and mega celebrity Margaret Atwood came up with by joining the words "utopia" and "dystopia" into one compact bundle. By...

In our section on "Narrator Point of View" in The Circle, we touch on the fact that Dave Eggers makes ample use of dramatic irony throughout the novel.Even though The Circle's third-person narrator...

The Circle is all about the kinds of communication that social networking tools like email, text messaging, instant messaging, comment threads, and other web forums make possible on a daily basis....

We won't circle around it, folks: The Circle is called The Circle for a reason.Sure, this baby is named for the high-tech company where most of the novel's characters are employed, but is that all...

You may have come across John Steinbeck's East of Eden in an American lit course, but don't feel worried if you haven't. Shmoop is here to tell you why Dave Eggers gives a shout-out to old Joh...

Friends, The Circle doesn't end on a happy note. Over in our "Genre" analysis, we called The Circle a work of dystopian fiction, but it might be a little more accurate to say that the novel is the...

The only thing likely to make you break into a sweat as you read The Circle is its length. Weighing in at just under 500 pages, the novel isn't the kind of thing that most readers will be able to p...

The Circle's exposition gets underway as Mae Holland finds herself with a brand-spanking-new job at the Circle—the world's hottest tech company, and, in her mind, the corporeal (and corporate) re...

The Circle's first act is also its first book. In Book I, Mae Holland takes up her brand-spanking-new job at the Circle and slowly gets accustomed to the social climate on campus. Although it takes...

Tom Hanks seems to have declared a monopoly on film adaptations of Dave Eggers' novels. Not only is he starring in the screen version of Eggers' A Hologram for the King, but he portrays Eamon Baile...

The Circle gets a hard R, Shmoopers. Sex scenes crop up pretty frequently throughout the novel, and Dave Eggers doesn't spare the details when they do. Whether Mae Holland is experiencing yet anoth...

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