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
Nick has found Amy’s vomit—in the back of a freezer in a jar, inside a box of Brussels sprouts. He has poured the sample down the drain, and though he left the empty jar on the counter for Amy to see, she’s never said a word about it. Nick knows that something is wrong—but can’t put his finger on what it is.
Nick is still rebelling against Amy in small ways, trying to show her that she doesn’t have the power over him she thinks she does—but he can’t escape the creeping sense that she’s still one step ahead of him.
Themes
Nick’s life, he says, “has begun to feel like an epilogue.” He and Boney and Go still meet up to try and find ways to take down Amy, but are unable to find a single thing suspicious about her diary. Only Boney and Go are still in Nick’s corner.
Flynn plays with narrative structure in this passage as she has Nick poke fun at the “epilogue” his life has become. He feels like a afterword in his own story, unable to reckon with what has transpired up to this point and unsure of where he’s headed next.
Themes
Bill finally dies one night in his sleep. Though Nick always imagined he’d feel better once his father died, he feels a “frightening hollowness open up” inside of him once he learns of the man’s death. After the funeral, Nick doesn’t cling to Go for comfort—rather, he goes home with Amy, and lets her hold him that night. All the while, he thinks about how he has to get out of the house, and be done with Amy forever. He has no idea who he is without her—but is determined to find out. The next morning, as Amy sits down to work on her memoir, Nick takes his laptop to the living room and begins working on his own lurid tale of their marriage.
Nick goes back and forth between finding comfort in Amy and feeling horrified by her. He’s aware that with each step they take to get closer to one another, he entangles himself more firmly in her web and keeps himself from ever growing strong enough to escape her. In attempting to do the only thing he can think of—write his story—he’s fighting fire with fire, weaponizing against Amy the thing she holds dearest: narrative control.
Themes
