Character Analysis
Blond, beautiful, ambitious, and consummately good at what she does, Annie Allerton is the Elle Woods of The Circle. She's also Mae Holland's very best friend—or she is until their friendship starts to unravel under the intense pressures of life at the Circle, anyway.
Annie and Mae were roommates when they were both undergraduate students at Carleton U. Like Mae, Annie was an athlete—a long-distance runner, and a good one, too (1.3.2). She was also involved in tons of other extracurricular activities and organizations on campus. She was a stellar student, too, and—being two years older than Mae—went on to do an MBA at Stanford before Mae had even finished her undergraduate degree (1.1.6).
Here's a snapshot of Annie in college, as seen through Mae's admiring eyes:
She was friendly with every one of her exes, with every hookup, with every professor (she knew them all personally and sent them gifts). She had been involved in, or ran, most or all of the clubs and causes in college, and yet she'd found time to be committed to her coursework—to everything, really—while also, at any party, being the most likely to embarrass herself to loosen everyone up, the last to leave (1.3.1).
In short, Annie is a powerhouse. She didn't have to apply for a job at the Circle; the Circle recruited her (1.1.6). By the time Mae joins the Circle's team, Annie is one of the company's prestigious Group of 40—the upper echelon of Circle employees, whose power in and importance to the company is second only to those of the Three Wise Men themselves.
As we explore in our "Character Roles" section, Annie and Mae are foils. In terms of their physical appearances, Annie is the blond light to Mae's brunette dark. In terms of their temperaments, Annie is outgoing, confident, and decisive, whereas Mae is indecisive, malleable, and ultra eager to please. At least, that's how things stand at the beginning of the novel. By the time The Circle wraps up, Annie's and Mae's positions have been reversed.
Nothing makes this clearer than the parallels Dave Eggers draws between the care and protectiveness that Annie gives to Mae during their college years and the quasi-care and quasi-protectiveness that Mae gives to Annie at the end of the novel. At Carleton, Annie nursed Mae back to health after Mae fell and broke her jaw (1.1.5). At the Circle, Mae sits by Annie's bedside while the former powerhouse lies exhausted, depleted, and unconscious in a coma (3.1.1-7).
By the end of The Circle, Annie is less than a shadow of her former self. The Circle and its uber-invasive social tools have sucked her dry, and, although the novel leaves things open ended, it's likely that her youth and vitality are gone for good. In the novel's own symbolic terms, she's just one more baby seahorse who's been devoured by a sleepless, insatiable shark.