She has systematically imagined the beast to be each of those around her, all representing a part of society she fears or dislikes. Now, she must put herself in the place of the beast; she has used her stories to "postpone the moment when [she] must ask is it [her] own snarl [she] hears in the undergrowth?" (50). Her imaginings have kept this at bay, but she can't bring herself to leave out the possibility, not even to protect herself. Magda is afraid of herself being the beast because she is apart from the rest of society; she can't see anything here "in the heart of the country where space radiates out from [her] to all four corners of the earth," that is capable of stopping her, there is nothing aside from herself and her stories that could prevent her from going mad. Magda can't use these stories indefinitely because they are composed from the language that stifles her, thus at the end of the novel she attempts, using broken Spanish, to create her own language. This too is unsuccessful; she can't bring her understanding and definition of herself beyond the words themselves and the 'end' or 'finality' she desires.


The film The Lives of Others shows life in the GDR under the surveillance of the secret Stasi force. Gerd Wiesler, the main character in the movie, is a loyal, highly trained Stasi operative and he is assigned to monitor Georg Dreyman and his girlfriend Christa-Marie Sieland. Dreyman is heavily involved in the theatre scene, as a playwright, and his life is full of art in many forms. In the social and political climate the movie portrays people usually assumed that they were being observed constantly. In the words of J. Hoberman, for those in the GDR, "[in] a perverse sense, surveillance was a form of entertainment: life lived under continuous observation was theater." This twisting of art and reality is shown in film, Wiesler's reality is twisted and changed through the influence of art and constant surveillance. 
	The presentation of surveillance in the film slowly flips around Wiesler's worldview. Surveillance has a superficial similarity to a play, with an "actor" and an "audience." The audience's very presence compels those on stage to act, and in true theatre the audience would gain something, whether an emotional catharsis or a new awareness, from the play. Those under surveillance are also heavily pressured to act, but not to impart something—to hide it. The parody of a play shown in the film has a negative impact on society, restraining cultural and emotional development. The GDR's government used this purposefully to help maintain loyalty and control over the people. It controlled the content of 'real' theatre and constructed an unimaginably extensive surveillance network. Wiesler himself starts out as a part of this network; loyal to the GDR, he firmly believes in the ideological aspect of the party. 