Gone Girl Analysis

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The Twisted Truth of Both Amy and Nick In Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, Amy, one of the main characters, fakes her own death in order to get revenge on her husband, Nick. Nick and Amy’s marriage is in a rough patch for a while, but things escalate when he uproots her from their New York home to his hometown in Carthage, Missouri. When Amy catches Nick cheating on her with one of his young college students, she decides that enough is enough, and she begins calculating her revenge. Amy comes up with and extravagant plan to make it look like Nick murdered her, and she hurts herself in the process to make it appear more realistic. Nick panics when they discover she has gone missing, and he does everything in his power to look innocent and be loved…show more content…
When the reader first discovers Amy has made herself appear to have gone missing, she says, “Item 22, cut myself, has been on the list a long time. Now it’s real, and my arm hurts. A lot. It takes a very special discipline to slice oneself past the paper-cut layer, down to the muscle” (Gone Girl 219). This evidence proves that Amy is willing to physically destroy herself to get revenge. Amy talks about how she constantly creates new personalities, and she must destroy her old personalities to achieve new ones. When she cuts her arm, “Diary Amy,” the submissive cool girl who does whatever Nick desires, dies. A new Amy is born, and this one seeks justice. By hurting herself to frame Nick, Amy gives herself the upper hand and outsmarts him, and this illustrates how dominant and cunning this personality is. She feels that she has been driven to this state, and “Dominant Amy” wants Nick to suffer for all his wrongdoings. Amy also utilizes both self-preservation and self-destruction when she poisons herself with antifreeze to make herself vomit and doing this enables her to create the perfect crime she desires. When Nick and Amy talk about what all she has done, she states, “‘All that vomit, so shocking. An innocent, frightened wife might have saved some of that vomit, just in case. You can’t blame her for being a little paranoid’” (Gone Girl
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