“You know what we call something that is afraid of something it doesn’t understand? Human.” –Aaahh! Real Monsters. In a comment I posted on a blog a couple of weeks ago, I asked the question, “What makes man a monster?” Can humans even be considered monsters by their dirty deeds and warped beliefs? Did Hyde’s […]
In a world filled with social media and the internet, how does a person separate who they are after subtracting media? In Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl, the media plays a huge role in the plot of the novel. Internet, television, the written and published word are all forms of media used to pull off […]
Within just the few chapter of reading Gone Girl (which is going to be made into a movie, woo hoo!), the topic that kept stirring in my mind was of Amy and Nick’s marriage and how gender roles coincided. So many times in the first few diary entries of the book, Amy talked about how […]
Lying is dominant throughout Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl.” Everywhere we turn, we find someone else lying. Nick is lying to everyone, Amy faked her own death, and everyone is lying about knowing the ‘dead’ Amy. There are outright lies, people omitting the truth, and people exaggerating the truth. We accept certain lies easier in the […]
Rand and Marybeth Elliott are some of the most unreal characters I have ever come across in a novel. They are like cookie cutter parents, the perfect couple that never fights, never raises a harsh word against each other. They are a team, a unit. Even Amy says as much, in her diary entries (which […]
Take a moment to contemplate your identity as an individual and decide if you are an autonomous or ideal member of society… Good… Now reimagine yourself as a psychopath. Amy’s identity for the first few years of her marriage is based solely on what she thinks her husband wants he to be but not who […]
I don’t think it’s worth debating whether or not Amy Elliot Dunne is a monster. She is brilliant, she is deliberate, she is dangerous, and she is undoubtedly a monster. I think the more interesting and more relevant question is whether or not Amy Elliot Dunne is the only monster in Gone Girl. Where are […]
To me, the classic literary monsters were created to express or expose the parts of humanity, of ourselves, that we can’t or won’t openly discuss. According to Wikipedia, “…the root of ‘monstrum’ is ‘monere’—which does not only mean to warn, but also to instruct, and forms the basis of the modern English demonstrate. […]
P: 145. “I was the embodiment of every writer’s worst fear: a cliché”. Throughout the novel, Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, Nick compulsively lies, cheats on his wife, and is deluded by each interaction with or thought of Amy. Throughout the novel, his opinion of her grows into a clump of disgust. He admits to […]
I am a huge fan of the T.V. show Criminal Minds so when I read the first page of Gone Girl I immediately thought of Phrenology. Can we tell a person’s hopes, impulses, personalities and character just by studying the shape and variations (morphology) of their skulls? Austrian Franz Joseph Gall certainly thought this was a possibility. […]
You know the story: Boy meets girl, girl likes guy, guy loses number, girl sees him years later, guy and girl marry. A pretty standard story if you read or watch romances. However, Amy and Nick’s marriage is anything but normal. Manipulation is the M in marriage for these two and for Amy it’s not […]
*Spoiler Alert* Most of us know the stereotypical spoiled brat that’s an only child, much like Veruca Salt in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. That may be a bit of an exaggeration but it does portray that only children may have personalities based on their birth order that affect their entire lives, even […]
Amy Dunne is a self-aware, intelligent female character. In Gone Girl, her fake journal and real reflections operate in tandem to demonstrate the way that many women gain awareness of the self first in terms of media portrayal and male expectation, last in terms of autonomy and desire. The double novel seems intended by Gillian […]
Throughout the course of our class we have often touched on the idea of humans as the most disturbing of all monsters, but one thing has always stopped me short: our lack of protean abilities. Humans are clearly not shape-shifting in the way that It, Jake Marlowe, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll, or even the demon in […]
I don’t remember how it started but all of the sudden Gillian Flynn was all the rage. I was hearing about Gone Girl left and right. Beginning of summer I had made an extensive summer reading list and Gone Girl made the top five. I went camping with my family and lo and behold one […]
Gone Girl, on the surface is a book about cunning plots and ruining reputations, raises some questions about human instinct and the diagnosis of mental illness. Since I read this novel in the context of a monster narrative course, I could not help but search for monstrous qualities in the characters. Who is the bad […]
First of it is a lie, and always a lie, to believe a sociopath is not a malicious form of a human being. Not its own special breed of monster. With that said it is my stance that Amy Elliott Dunne’s character is a sociopath, the entity of the worst cold blooded killer, a parasite […]
Alright, I cheated: I started reading through all of my fellow ENG333-ers’ blog posts before beginning my own (cardinal sin?). Just wanted an edge I suppose. Anyway, what I have read so far has been intriguing: lots about marriage, about gender archetypes, and psychopathy. All of these things–themes–are very central in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, […]
So although the plot to Gone Girl is much more complex than a simple husband-wife murder, it nevertheless got me thinking about real life murders. Why is it that in the murder of a married woman, the husband is always the prime suspect? Why do so many husbands murder their wives? “It’s always the husband, […]
We all lie. Lies can be big or small, simple or tangled, accidental or purposeful, malicious or thoughtful. Lies are used to cover up the ugly truth. In the novel Gone Girl, lies are extremely prevalent, to the point of compulsion for both of the main characters. This compulsive lying, while a monstrous trait, does […]
“I write because I want to have more than one life,” so said writer Anne Tyler. Throughout my own writing life, which started in middle school, I have found these words to be true for me as well. Any time I can hop my rust-flecked red caboose, fingers wrapped around slim metal bars sluggishly emitting […]
I intended to write my blog at about the halfway point in the novel, but I found myself incapable of putting this book down so I am now writing this having completed the book. Potential spoilers, be aware, stop now. There are many issues in the novel that left me with countless questions and thoughts, […]
When I first started reading this book, I thought for sure that it was going to be one of those happily-ever-after stories, but I was completely wrong! Amy becomes obsessed with her marriage with her husband, and how nothing seems to go her way, she even goes so far as to blacken out days on […]
Gone Girl is the wet dream of every misogynistic men’s ‘rights’ activist. Amy, the villain of the novel, is the embodiment of all the evil sexist narratives that are thrown towards feminism. To be clear: I am NOT saying that women cannot be villains. I love when women are presented in a role that is […]
Many individuals dream of finding the perfect person, someone who they feel completes them. When they find this person, they instantly dream of wedding bells, exchanging vows, and the big cake at the end of the night. Take away the glitz, glamour, and tradition, and what are you left with? Well, besides an incredible bill, there’s […]
“They get to be perfect without even trying, without even facing one moment of existence, while I am stuck here on earth, and every day I must try, and every day is a chance to be less than perfect” (Flynn 222). When looking upon class issues, being a part of the upper/middle classes provide more […]
Cats vs. Dogs. Good vs. Evil. Robots vs. Aliens! There is always a right party, and a wrong party. A protagonist and an antagonist. What is this gray area of which you speak? Compromise is for suckers: both parties lose to some degree. How do we know who is right? The victor writes the history. […]