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53. Nick Dunne, Forty Days Gone
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
Amy presents the medical examiners with the evidence of her body—a “textbook” example of a rape victim. Amy knows that when the police arrive at Desi’s lake house they’ll find him “naked and drained” in a bed soaked with Amy’s blood.
Amy has created the perfect scene, engineering a tableau that makes it look as if Amy finally killed her captor after months of rape and torture, fleeing straight back to her husband.
Themes
Boney asks Amy if she’s able to come to the station for an interview, and Amy—determined to maintain her “Amazing” front and always put others first—agrees. At the station, the officers hold the press back while Amy makes her way inside and reunites with her parents. Gilpin and Boney quickly whisk Amy away into a private room, where they interrogate her on the details of the day of her disappearance. As the interview progresses, it becomes clear that Boney wants to poke some holes in Amy’s story. Amy is too good, though, and always one step ahead of each question—she even criticizes the cops for their lazy policework, and for attempting to pin everything on her sweet, innocent husband, Nick. The interview concludes with Boney telling Amy what she wants to hear—that she is an “absolute hero.”
This passage makes it clear that while the larger public—and Amy’s family—celebrates her return with glee and gratitude, Boney is suspicious of the story Amy has woven. Perhaps privately convinced that Tanner and Nick’s story is the true one, Boney attempts to expose an inaccuracy or inconsistency in Amy’s story—but Amy, a mastermind, is unable to be stumped. In the end Boney, like Nick, is forced to just tell Amy what she wants to hear.
Themes
