A central theme in Great Circle is the imitation of life. The two narratives—the lives of Marian and Hadley—are linked through this theme. The first narrative portrays the complexities of Marian’s life, while the second shows Hadley’s attempts to turn Marian’s complicated life into a film. The various errors and misunderstandings of Hadley’s film illustrate how reality and art are often far apart. Hadley’s film fails to deal with Marian’s bisexuality, mistakes many events from her life, and completely misrepresents her death. The gulf between reality and its artistic representation shows how the imitation of life is impossible: People are simply too complicated, nuanced, and contradictory to satisfyingly portray in condensed artistic forms; subtleties and intricacies are flattened and ignored. No film (and no book) could hope to represent Marian exactly as she was, and the novel uses the structure of two competing narratives to highlight this futility.

James Graves faces similar problems. He is an artist who becomes disillusioned with artistic principles. The more he paints, the more he understands that his art is a pale imitation of his subjects. His work becomes increasingly abstract as he moves beyond literal representations of subjects and toward a more emotive approach.