The Circle Dave Eggers

In her short story “Happy Endings”, Margaret Atwood uses different literary techniques that can alter the interpretation of the story’s theme. The story starts off with a generic “fairy tale” ending in which a husband and a wife live a happy life together and eventually die. However, as the story progresses, Atwood’s style and tone makes the alternate scenarios of John and Mary give off a sense of uncertainty of what main ideas she is trying to convey. Good opening and thesis.

In “Happy Endings,” Margaret Atwood manipulates literary techniques to emphasize how each story can have different plots yet end up with the same ending. She makes the case that, in every ending, the characters finish having a happy ending and “eventually they die” (paragraph 4). She infers that it is the contents between the beginning, and the end that bring interest and challenge to the characters, while the beginnings are more fun. The “true connoisseurs” is an important element because it is what makes up the plot (paragraph 21). The six scenarios of “Happy Endings” introduce differences in the beginning and the middle of the plot but result in the same ending. The plot in each scenario focuses on the significance of understanding how

One of the main themes of Into the Woods is the idea of having a happy ending. After the protagonists go through a tough journey, a sad beginning to a strange experience, a happy ending is often the best result. After finding the answers one is looking for,

At the end, the characters accept their motives, ambitions, hopes and fears which determine their actions

The ends of the story are very different from each other in quite a few ways. Let just say there is a good ending in one story and a bad ending in another. Lets go deeper

In the short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” by Joyce Carol Oates shows the readers similarities to the epic tails of the past. It is to be expected that with the similarities between the story and the epics, that the story does not always end up in just the way the reader thinks they might. Most of today's readers want an ending in which the heroine of the story Connie, ends up getting what she deserves in just about everything. But, looking back to the epic tails almost nothing ever ends in the way the characters deserve to happen. The characters are put through hardships, trails, tribulations, and failings to show that the character is indeed just merely human. However, the journey in which Joyce Carol Oates takes Connie

Eventually, in my early teens, I took up reading books such as The Odyssey by Homer, and various other works relating to the Trojan War. As is typical with many Greek stories, The Odyssey presented me with a hero I could look up to, but I was dealt my first shock when I realized that not all books have a happy ending. Quite the contrary in most Greek literature. While the Odyssey does have a fairly happy ending, other books on the Trojan War presented a much different picture. Achilles, another one of my heroes at the time, dies, and the city of Troy is sacked. I wasn’t sure how to take these bizarre endings. I say bizarre because as a kid in this day and age, I was presented with stories that always ended happily. The guy always got the girl. The hero always saved the day. The criminal was always caught. This was quite out of the ordinary in my world. I began to realize that the stories and movies I had previously always been presented, were in no way a honest view of reality. Bad things did happen, and that was life. Instead of turning away from this reality, I embraced it, realizing that while the stories themselves may not be true, the reality of the situations faced in them were.

Dave Eggers was born on March 12, 1970 in Boston, Massachusetts. Eggers was the son of a lawyer and a school teacher. Although he was born in Boston, Eggers was raised in Lake Forest, Illinois. Eggers went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to study journalism, but then tragedy struck for the young college student. Both his father and mother both became ill with cancer and died a short time later.

Happy Endings is an oddly structured, metafictional story; a series of possible scenarios all leading the characters to the same ending. Atwood uses humour and practical wisdom to critique both romantic fiction and contemporary society, and to make the point that it is not the end that is important, it is the journey that truly matters in both life and writing.

Every child has found himself hopelessly lost in his favorite fairy tale. Little girls scattered across the world long for their Prince Charming to slip the glass slipper onto dainty feet, and young boys dream of slaying fire-breathing monsters and rescuing their kingdom. Children’s writers strive to write a tale more memorable than those of Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm. So, what causes humans to gravitate towards storylines of triumph over evil and justice keeping order? People love a story with a happy, predictable ending because it allows them to believe in happy endings for their own lives. As Neil Gaiman said, “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” This same principle can be applied with the book The Life of Pi by Yann Martel; Pi is thrown into circumstances that seem impossible to overcome, and although he loses all of his family, he is able to make a full recovery and begins a new life afterwards. Therefore, I believe that The Life of Pi, ultimately, has a happy ending because Pi’s perseverance through his unfortunate circumstances shapes his resilience, his trials produce self-confidence, he has surmounted all the obstacles in life and survives, and he is able to physically, emotionally, socially, and spiritually cope and recover from the major traumas in his life.

Published in 2013, Dave Eggers’ dystopian novel The Circle chronicles life at the world’s most prestigious technology company to illustrate the dangers of the modern digital age at its most extreme. From the beginning of the novel, the company asserts its belief that “all that happens must be known” and encourages total transparency to make this possible. The Circle is constantly developing and unveiling new, sophisticated technology designs which aid in achieving complete transparency and the ultimate goal of “completing the Circle.” By proposing the Circle’s imminent “completion,” the company hints at a world of complete visibility and constant surveillance – a world that closely resembles the panoptic, all-seeing power described in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. The opening of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish parallels the novel’s idea of completion by mentioning the “completion of the carceral system.” Foucault dates the completion of the carceral system to the official opening of Mettray, the disciplinary institution he recognizes as the ‘ideal’ panoptic prison and the “disciplinary form at its most extreme.” Using Foucault’s Discipline and Punish as a lens through which to interpret Egger’s The Circle reveals that the Circle is analogous to Mettray and its imminent completion connotes its establishment as the ultimate panoptic prison for the entire world.

The circle is an innovative fiction novel written by Dave Eggers, exploring how a prevailing creation controlling everything on the Internet including user accounts, passwords, credit cards and most importantly identity, demands transparency in all things. The Circle was made to eliminate identity theft, privacy and anonymity among all users while everything happening online was broadcasted and permanently saved into The Circle. Dave Eggers is an American novelist and screenwriter. Eggers has gained a lot of experience through his literary work, and due to his collaboration with Salon, a progressive news website focusing on U.S. politics and current matters, he was able to use his knowledge, and connect with The Circle in a vast political perspective.

As we grow up, we hear fairy tales and we read them into our lives. Every word and every image is imprinted into our minds. The fairy tales we read are never abandoned. They grow with us and our dreams become molds of the many morals and happily ever afters fairy tales display. We tell children fairy tales when they go to sleep and they read them in school and we even have them watch Disney adaptions that reinforce them further. Generally, they were everywhere while we grew up and they continue to be present while children are growing up now. But what influence do these stories have? We casually expose our children to these tales, but in some cases they can have particularly, harmful personal effects on them, although there is nothing completely or visibly “bad” about them or about the characters in them. Before we divulge our youth to these stories, we should assess their substance and see what sort of effect they may be having on them. They have received so much scrutiny and have been studied by many. Recognizing fairy tales effects on the minds of children is vital in their development. This paper will focus on the underlying messages that the average person wouldn’t recognize in these everyday stories. There’s a modern distort with fairy tales because while they still are widely popular with the youth, they influence children’s self images, outlooks on reality and expectations for their futures, especially for young women.

I like to read stories that have good endings, but some of the finest lessons we can learn come from stories with unhappy endings.

Fairy tales are something that everyone has read or seen, they all seem to have important lessons at the end of each one to teach young children some of the lessons they need for life. These fairy tales when we were younger all seemed innocent and something we all hoped that would happen to us. Little did we know as we got older that the fairy tales we all knew and loved when we were younger, weren't as innocent as they seemed.