Relationships In Gone Girl

Friends of people getting married often jest that marriage means “Game Over” for their once seemingly single brethren, but for Nick and Amy Elliot Dunne in Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl the game doesn’t end. Like other couples, they put on a mask of their best selves to accommodate the other person in their life while dating, but their inability to be honest with each other about who they are cause a downward spiral in their marriage. Instead of shedding their masks just as most couples do when they become comfortable in a relationship, Amy and Nick continued to “live out false images of themselves” into their marriage (Jones 44). I agree that the couple are, “two attractive phonies who have mistaken each other for the real thing” (Alleva 23). As their marital issues intensified, the masks start to slip away. After Amy is supposedly kidnapped and presumed dead, with Nick taking the blame, the real personalities of these two characters emerge. Using the three …show more content…
Amy reveals her “smart, unflinching, and sociopathic” self to the audience after meticulous calculation of her husband’s demise down to her own suicide that she chooses later not to go through with (Jones). While writing the journal, “her deceptiveness and her dormant fury” (Hume 3) grew like when Charlotte Perkins Gillman was writing The Yellow Wall Paper. In the article A Good Man is Hard To Find by Flannery O’Connor we can see her as the:
“… Ruthlessly manipulative and moralistic grandmother, immersed in the sin of Pride…[that] has long maintained the flattering illusion of a radical distinction between herself and others. Self-righteously superior, she therefore can justify all of her own behavior…” (Bonney 347).
She is even as boastful to