Secrets and Lies
Midway through the plot of Gone Girl comes the revelation that Amy Elliott Dunne has not been killed or kidnapped, but rather has orchestrated her own disappearance in an attempt to frame her husband, Nick Dunne, for murder as vengeance for the emotional damage he’s done to her life and their marriage. This shocking twist overturns everything that Gillian Flynn’s audience has come to believe up until that point. As the second half of the…
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Marriage
Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl is, at its heart, a novel about marriage. Though Nick and Amy’s marriage is a supremely twisted example, Flynn uses their extreme circumstances to make a larger narrative comment on what it means to be in a partnership, make a commitment, and weather the unforeseeable, uncontrollable aspects of a life lived entwined with another person. In any romantic partnership or marriage, people bind themselves to one another for better or…
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Misogyny
A deep, dark thread of misogyny—dislike of, contempt for, or prejudice against women—runs through the pages of Gone Girl the way the Mississippi river winds through Nick’s hometown of Carthage, Missouri. It is inseparable from the thoughts and actions of many of the characters, and it defines the relationships—romantic, familial, platonic—throughout the novel. However, it is not only the men in the story who are guilty of being biased against or even outright hateful…
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Writing, Storytelling, and Narrative
Nick and Amy are—or were—both writers by trade. Laid off from high-profile magazine jobs before the events of the novel began, both of them struggle with repressed creativity, a desire to organize the things that happen to them into stories, and to wrest control of their life’s narratives from the forces that have derailed them both. As Nick and Amy become increasingly obsessed with taking back the reins of their own stories, they employ various…
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