Research Paper On Gone Girl

Yours Truly, The Gone Girl
Authored by The New York Times bestselling novelist Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl is an alarming look at the downfall of a corrupt marriage characterized by infidelity, discontent, resentment, and, ultimately, psychopathy. The couple’s toxic relationship culminating in tragedy, Nick Dunn arrives home on his fifth wedding anniversary to find his house ransacked and his wife Amy missing. As the police dive into a high stakes investigation in the presumed kidnapping of Amy, the public, police and even the reader begin to question Nick’s love and devotion to his wife as every piece of evidence uncovered seems to highlight Nick’s flaws. Implementing a new technique in modern literature, Gillian Flynn manipulates the reader’s
opinion of the characters through the use of two first-person perspectives throughout the novel’s entirety.
In part one with this strategy adopted, Nick Dunn narrates the daily events of the manhunt for his wife in the present tense and, in alternating chapters, the reader is given an excerpt of Amy’s diary from the past about her relationship with Nick leading up to her disappearance. Piling incriminating evidence against Nick, Amy’s diary entries paint her as a devout, loving wife who began to fear the ever brooding, verbally abusive, Nick Dunn even directly stating within her diary, “I catch him looking at me with those watchful eyes… and I think: this man might kill me. So if you find this and I’m dead, well… Sorry, that’s not funny (Flynn 205)”. Every journal passage digs Nick a deeper hole, and paired with his own personal confession of infidelity and his proclamations of discontent with his wife, readers reach the seemingly sound conclusion that Nick kidnapped, or worse, murdered Amy. In the beginning of part two, Gillian Flynn flips the tables on the reader, erasing every preconception of the lovely Amy Dunn: the diary entries, all counterfeit, were written by Amy with the sole intention of framing the real victim of the novel, Nick. The use of Amy’s diary in the novel is to exploit the reader’s emotional attachment to the helpless Amy Dunn caught in an unhealthy relationship and to discredit
Nick’s viewpoint as the plot unfolds. Each diary excerpt serves as an attempt at persuading the reader to turn against the narrator Nick and, ultimately, this strategy is effective at manipulating the audience’s view of Amy and Nick. A perfect example of the persuasive power of Amy’s diary entry can be found on pages 98 through 102 as Nick decides to abruptly move their life together to Missouri.
As Nick sleeps on the hotel bed surrounded by wrappers from junk food he bought, Amy dives into her version of the morning that Nick received news that his mother had been diagnosed with an aggressive case of stage four brain cancer. Brimming with overt jabs at her husband, Amy’s staged entries including the selected text were written exclusively to win the reader’s trust. Since journal entries, a very personal form of writing, are used as the medium of introducing Amy to the reader, Gillian guarantees a deeper level of trust and attachment to Amy. Aware of the effect the diary has on readers, Gillian effectively keeps the audience in the dark through all of part one to Amy’s true occasion for writing the diary: to frame her cheating husband. Since Amy is the speaker of the diaries, she creates a more favorable image of herself and distorts reality in her own favor in order to win over the audience. Though Amy’s diary entries produce an image of Amy as a devout wife married to a selfish and domineering husband, in reality, Amy is a psychopath seeking revenge on her unfaithful husband. On page 98, Amy recalls the breakfast on the morning that Nick received a call from his sister writing, “... I can tell by his voice that it is Go. He sounds springy, boyish, the way he always does when he talks to her. The way he used to talk to me (Flynn)”. Simplistically styled, the short acknowledgement of Nick’s change in demeanor with Amy is intended to create sympathy for a wife who perceives that she is losing her husband. Similar situations in the text are crafted to arouse feelings of sympathy for Amy such as when Nick leaves Amy alone staring at her breakfast as Nick talks on the phone. Waiting for Nick to permit her to eat without him or signal her that his conversation is near over, Amy briefly discusses discontent with Nick before inwardly punishing herself for being unhappy with Nick. Seemingly insignificant, this internal conflict over an event as routine as breakfast reveals many important things about the woman Amy wishes to present to the public. Waiting for Nick’s approval before eating demonstrates the power Nick has over Amy and his disregard for her as he talks on the phone reveal the selfish component Amy desires to show in her diary version of Nick. Continuing this theme, Amy correcting herself for being upset that Nick rudely left her alone also accumulates sympathy for Amy as it is clear that in the situation she did no wrong. As the purpose of the diary is to persuade the audience to like Amy, it is important to take into account exactly who the audience is. In the opening chapter of the novel, the readers of the story are given Nick’s narration of his anniversary and how Nick claims that by merely talking to Amy, “Bile and dread inched up my throat (7)”. Already doubting Nick since the beginning of the novel’s first chapter, the audience is open to persuasion and Amy’s diary through the use of strong tone words, powerful metaphors and the biased account of life in the Dunn house takes advantage of the impressionable reader. When Nick returns from talking to Go, he is shaken but calmly informs Amy that his mother is dying. With Amy narrating, she describes how Nick is upset yet he does not cry in the face of family tragedy. Expounding upon this idea, Amy states that she’s never seen her husband cry which in essence dehumanizes Nick making him seem capable of murdering his wife.