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3. Nick Dunne, The Day Of (2)
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
After their kiss in the sugar storm, Amy has not seen Nick Dunne for over eight months. Nick “resurfaces” in Amy’s life when she runs into him on the street one day—he is full of excuses about having lost her cell phone number. Amy, who had been angry about not hearing from him, softens, and within days they are together as a couple. The timing of their reunion, Amy feels, is fortuitous—the twentieth installment in the Amazing Amy series, Amazing Amy and the Big Day, has just been released, and in the book Amazing Amy gets married. Amy feels shamed, as she has all her life, by her “literary alter ego.” Amy takes a bit of comfort in the fact that her parents’ publishers have ordered a smaller run for this book than any other.
Though Amy is an independent adult woman, this passage shows that she remains haunted by the ghost of her alter ego. She feels an intense pressure to keep up with “Amazing Amy,” and leaps at the opportunity to fling herself into a committed relationship so that she can play some catch up with her literary double.
Themes
For Amy’s entire life, her parents have published Amazing Amy books that coincide with their daughter’s experiences. The “amazing” Amy always outstrips the real Amy, learning lessons and accomplishing milestones that the actual Amy fails and falls short at. Amy describes milling about the book launch party for the new installment, fielding obnoxious questions from journalists about the state of her own romantic life. Amy’s parents, Rand and Marybeth, whom Amy describes as looking like a “prehistoric-monster-fish” and a “chicken,” respectively, bob around the party and ignore their lonely only child.
The intense pressure which has marked all of Amy’s childhood has been created and manufactured by her parents, whom Amy describes in unforgiving and frightful terms. She clearly doesn’t like her parents, and resents them for how they’ve turned her life into a spectacle for the masses—all the while reminding their daughter that there is always room for improvement.
Themes
Back at her apartment after the party, Amy cries. She is nearly thirty-two, and despite being pretty, interesting, and rich, she has no one. She both yearns for a companion and fears ending up like her friends who have gotten married just for the sake of getting married, and endure partnerships with weak or roving men.
Amy feels genuine sadness and confusion at the idea of what it means to be married. She feels pressure to cave to traditional monogamy, but admits outright that she doesn’t know what it means to be a partner—or how to choose one.
Themes
The day after the party, Amy runs into Nick on Seventh Avenue, and feels the “pow” of recognition. It seems like they “just know each other,” even after months of having lost touch. As Amy falls headlong in love with Nick over the next few days, she is grateful that the “rest of [her] life” has begun at last.
Amy’s attachment to Nick is cast in a new light thanks to this diary entry, which raises the question of whether she truly loves him or sees him as an expedient way to catch up with Amazing Amy, assuage her own fears about loneliness, and assert, oddly enough, her independence from her parents.
Themes
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