Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Gone Girl, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Secrets and Lies
Marriage
Misogyny
Writing, Storytelling, and Narrative
Summary
Analysis
Amy writes that something is “horribly wrong” with her husband, Nick. She can feel him watching her sometimes, and often catches a look of “disgust” on his face as he stares at her. She writes about having discovered him looking over a pile of credit card bills, and also divulges that Nick recently shoved her so hard during an argument that she fell and hit her head against the kitchen island. Amy admits she provoked Nick into pushing her—but was desperate for him to stop treating her like a “ghost.” Amy says that the shove itself didn’t scare her—but the look on Nick’s face afterward, which said he wanted to shove her again, did.
At this point in the diary, Amy is inventing pure fiction in order to make Nick look as guilty as possible. Readers don’t know this for sure yet—but as the gulf between Amy and Nick’s stories grows wider, the narrative divergence between their accounts of their shared past tips readers off to the fact that something is amiss.
Themes
Amy writes that yesterday, she drove out to the run-down mall, where Noelle has told her that her husband goes to purchase an occasional bit of marijuana. Amy was on a mission to get a gun. If she had one, she thought, she’d feel “safer.” She chides herself for not being able to leave Nick, even though something inside of her knows that he is going to hurt her again.
The motif of Nick and Amy feeling yoked to one another and unable to separate will continue recurring throughout the novel. They are a dangerous duo, drawn to one another even as they destroy one another emotionally and—according to Amy, at least—physically.
Themes
