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7. Nick Dunne, The Night Of
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
“Poor me,” Amy writes in her diary. She describes having dinner with two of her girlfriends, during which they talk about little other than their husbands. All three women text their men to meet them at the restaurant for a nightcap—only Nick doesn’t show, and doesn’t even call Amy to tell her why he’s not coming. The other women seem to delight in Amy’s inability to control her husband. Amy and Nick, though, regularly make fun of couples in which the wives treat their husbands like “dancing monkeys,” and Amy prides herself on never forcing Nick to play that “happy-hubby role.”
Amy is positioning herself, through her diary entries, as a woman who dotes on her husband, gives him free run of his life, and never nags. There is a lot to unpack here: Diary Amy, different from the real Amy readers will meet later on, seems contemptuous of other women’s need to control their husbands—and yet it will become clear that the actual Amy is contemptuous of women like Diary Amy who try to seem cool, aloof, and blasé about their husbands’ behavior.
Themes
Amy and Nick arrive home at their brownstone at the same time. Amy blithely asks Nick how he spent his night, and he tells her he was playing poker after work with some guys from his magazine. Amy seems happy that Nick spent his night the way he wanted to. They go upstairs together, have a drink, make love and fall asleep tangled in one another’s arms. “Poor me,” Amy writes again, sarcastically.
Amy wants to emphasize the fact that she allowed Nick to do as he pleased throughout their marriage—and was happy to be the obliging, pliable wife he wanted.
Themes
