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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text's major themes.
Dishonesty
Gone Girl is a novel about dishonest people. Nick and Amy are both absolutely willing to abuse, manipulate, or avoid the truth if necessary, and their assurance that this behavior is going unnoticed defines their relationship. Amy lies about everything, constantly. She adds more lies to support her previous lies. She even writes down a whole life based on lies, as the reader discovers when the truth about “Diary Amy” comes out. Nick lies about his affair with Andie, his finances, his whereabouts, and his relationship with Amy. But it’s not just the protagonists who lie; Amy’s parents lie to her about money, Desi lies to Nick about contact with Amy, members of the public in Carthage speculate and spread rumors. The entire plot hinges on Amy's most elaborate lie—her disappearance—but the power of lies to warp reality appears in every chapter of this novel.
Confinement
The motif of confinement—both real and imagined—recurs regularly in Gone Girl. Amy's meticulously crafted plan to disappear and frame Nick confines her to a life of hiding and secrecy. She thought it would bring her freedom, but it almost paints her into a corner where she must come clean or commit suicide. Nick, on the other hand, feels boxed in by the public's perception of him as a “creep” and the intense scrutiny he faces during the investigation. Because all of the attention makes him feel claustrophobic, he lies even when he doesn’t have to. Their marriage itself acts as a trap, with societal and personal expectations and a mutual sense of resentment stopping them from doing what they really want to. Amy is furious when she’s forced to leave New York and move to Missouri, feeling confined in a place she has no interest in. After she escapes the Ozarks, she’s literally confined at Desi Collings’s house as he keeps her prisoner. Desi's obsessive love and desire to make Amy “herself” again physically restrict her freedom and autonomy. All of this trouble was supposed to result in Nick being confined forever: Amy wanted to send him “up the river” to prison, as she said in her note, and then to his death. The constant psychological manipulation and mind games between Nick and Amy also create a sense of confinement for the reader, as both characters are ensnared with one another. The Dunnes have built themselves a trap they can’t escape.
Telling Stories
Literature and writing are very important to the narrative arc of Gone Girl. They’re also tied to the novel’s reflections about self-perception and social position. Nick and Amy both think of themselves as writers, regardless of the job they actually do. Amy certainly is a writer even if she’s not paid for it; she composes an entire fictional autobiography for herself to incriminate Nick. Years before this, Amy’s parents wrote and published the childhood of an imagined daughter for themselves. “Amazing Amy” is literature and “Actual Amy” is the disappointing reality. Amy, as a result of this, often treats real life and real people as if they’re fictional. She doesn’t care about how the consequences of her actions affect others, because they aren’t important to the story she’s telling herself.
Writing also shapes people’s perception of Nick’s and Amy’s identity in real time. The media slams Nick in writing, telling a story about how they suspect he might have killed Amy based on the (fictional) clues she planted and the stories she told other people around her. Desi believes his relationship with Amy is still viable, as the two exchange letters that seem far distant from Amy’s married reality in Carthage. Finally, at the end of the novel, both Amy and Nick write tell-all memoirs about the experience of her disappearing. However, Amy’s book is the only one that will get published. As usual, she makes sure that her voice and the story she wishes to tell are the only ones that see the light of day. Her fictional retelling of her “kidnapping” makes it seem far more real than Nick’s half-baked stories about her scheming.
