Character Analysis
Mercer Medeiros gets a lot of flak in The Circle, but that's only because the novel's third-person, limited-omniscient narrator sees so much of the world through Mae Holland's eyes. Whereas Mae despises her ex-boyfriend and denigrates him as an overweight, unkempt, pathetic, paranoid loser, we readers have a better vantage point from which to judge his strengths and weaknesses.
Quite apart from being the deranged clod that Mae believes him to be, Mercer is one of The Circle's strongest voices of reason, and, along with Ty Gospodinov, he exemplifies the message that the novel as a whole is trying to communicate.
Throughout The Circle, Mercer does his best to intervene against the brainwashing that Mae is undergoing at the Circle. Here he is on the social media tools that the Circle creates and promotes:
"It's not that I'm not social. I'm social enough. But the tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally extreme social needs. No one needs the level of contact you're purveying. It improves nothing. It's not nourishing. It's like snack food. You know how they engineer this food? They scientifically determine precisely how much salt and fat they need to include to keep you eating. You're not hungry, you don't need the food, it does nothing for you, but you keep eating those empty calories. This is what you're pushing. Same thing." (1.19.63)
And here he is on the Circle's criminal and quite obviously anti-democratic activities:
"You think it's just a coincidence that every time some congresswoman or blogger talks about monopoly, they suddenly become ensnared in some terrible sex-porn-witchcraft controversy? For twenty years, the internet was capable of ruining anyone in minutes, but not until your Three Wise Men, or at least one of them, was anyone willing to do it. You're saying this is news to you?" (1.40.77)
Although Mae dismisses Mercer's repeated warnings as the ravings of a paranoid conspiracy theorist, the novel itself proves Mercer right. Not that it matters to him: Mercer is dead by the time The Circle draws to a close, and, anyway, it wouldn't have given him any satisfaction to see his worst fears being brought to life.
Despite the fact that Mae despises Mercer, his words affect her enough to guide her conscience—however unconsciously—throughout much of the novel. By causing Mercer's death, Mae not only kills the wisest and most stable person in her life, but it also quells what's left of her conscience, too.