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 reveals that she saw Nick and Andie together months and months ago—when she showed up to surprise him at The Bar one night, she saw the two of them kissing. Amy wasn’t so much hurt by the discovery of the affair as she was by the knowledge that she was now “Average Dumb Woman Married to Average Shitty Man.” Nick, she felt, had “single-handedly de-amazed Amazing Amy.” Amy became filled with rage at the idea that Nick could change her forever and “win.” She began thinking of a different story she could tell about their marriage—one that would “make [her] the hero” again.
Amy is something of a misogynist herself. She has a great deal of contempt for other women, and hates considering that she herself is anything like the common, dull women she looks down on and resents. Amy feels, though, that Nick has dragged her down to this level—he’s made her unremarkable by subjecting her to such an everyday, embarrassing humiliation. Amy is determined to reclaim her own story instead of being a character in her husband’s narrative.
Themes
Amy writes that she’s fully aware of how “extreme” it is to frame one’s husband for murder. At the same time, to leave or divorce Nick would still allow him to win—and she wanted her husband to lose big. She was desperate to teach her husband a lesson—and admits that she might have “gone a bit mad” in the process.
The shocking twist at the heart of Gone Girl wasn’t just hard for Amy to pull off—Gillian Flynn, too, needs to suffuse Amy’s psychotic actions with a little bit of self-awareness in order to keep the narrative convincing.
Themes
As Amy approaches the hundred-mile mark on her journey, she reflects on the way she plotted the “perfect murder.” She purchased an old Ford getaway car in cash, and has been rotating it from long-term lot to long-term lot down in St. Louis for months. She’s now planning on holing up in the Ozarks, in a cheap rent-by-the-week cabin. She stops at a rest stop on the highway, cuts off large chunks of her hair, and dyes what’s left a dark, mousy brown. As she admires her handiwork—how ugly she’s made herself—she finds herself thinking that she could have avoided everything with Nick if she’d just been “less pretty” when they met.
Even as Amy resents Nick for making the story of her life average and unremarkable, Amy finds herself wishing that she were just a little less special—a little more like everyone else. Amy’s astounding beauty has long masked the less attractive parts of her personality, but now, free of her long hair, she’s actually grateful not to look so “amazing.”
Themes
Amy writes that she must figure out how to be “Dead Amy.” She was able to figure out “Diary Amy” without a hitch, and enjoyed sprinkling incriminating clues throughout her entry. She applauds herself for the “discipline” that constructing a retroactively written but convincing diary took, and creating someone that not only the cops but the public could easily love. Looking back on all her careful planning, Amy doesn’t even regret leaving her parents in the lurch—she hates them, too, for siphoning money from her, deserting her, and “consigning” her to a life with no money, no home, and no friends. Amy believes that Nick, Rand, and Marybeth “killed [her] soul”—which should be a crime worthy of a fitting punishment.
Amy has created so many different selves that it’s hard to keep track of which one was the original Amy—the Amy she feels that Nick and her parents have, over the years, wiped out of existence. Amy doesn’t want to go back to being the old her—she wants to be a new person entirely, in control of her own life and removed from the people who have slowly decimated her.
Themes
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