Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl: The Author Doesn’t Know That Her Character Has Multiple Personality

Amy discovers that her husband, Nick, is unfaithful. To take revenge, she leaves home—thus the title, Gone Girl—and stages her disappearance to look like he has killed her and disposed of the body.

So it is astoundingly inconsistent when Amy tells the reader that she is planning to kill herself, and will do so in a way that her body will never be found. Why would she kill herself after successfully taking revenge? And if she is going to kill herself anyway, why not ensure Nick’s conviction for murder by providing her dead body to the police?

If you haven’t read Gone Girl, you might wonder how a story with such amateurish inconsistencies could get published. But if you recall my post on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, you can guess the answer. The novel is otherwise so well written that the reader ignores or makes excuses for the inconsistencies.

Now, when I say that the author doesn’t know that Amy has multiple personality, I must qualify that statement by saying that the author has partial insight, and sometimes seems to be intentionally providing clues to Amy’s multiple personality. For example, Nick recalls that Amy had once taken singing lessons from a Paula, and knew a Jessie from a fashion-design course. “But then I’d ask about Jessie or Paula a month later, and Amy would look at me like I was making up words” (1, p. 46). This implies that Amy’s regular personality had amnesia for what her singing and fashion-design personalities had been doing.

Amy says, “The way some women change fashion regularly, I change personalities…I think most people do this, they just don’t admit it, or else they settle on one persona because they’re too lazy or stupid to pull off a switch” (1, p. 222).

And Nick is not totally oblivious to Amy’s deep changeability. He says, “She’s like this endless archeological dig: You think you’ve reached the final layer, and then you bring down your pick one more time, and you break through to a whole new mine shaft beneath. With a maze of tunnels and bottomless pits” (1, pp.253-254).

At one point, Amy distinguishes between two personalities, herself and another “I,” who has come into play since she faked her death. She says, speaking about a man named Jeff: “I wonder if ‘I’ might like sleeping with him” (1, p. 282). “I have absolutely no intention of being part of this illicit piscine economy, but ‘I’ am fairly interested. How many women can say they were part of a fish-smuggling ring? ’I’ am game. I have become game again since I died…‘I’ can do pretty much anything. A ghost has that freedom” (1, p. 286). Note: She has become game again, meaning that this other “I” personality, who is game for things that her regular self isn’t, had been present in the past, before she staged her death.

Why, then, do I say that Gillian Flynn has only partial insight to Amy’s multiple personality? After all, she has Amy explicitly say (see above), “I change personalities.” But she then says—like Philip Roth in his Paris Review interview (see past post)—“I think most people do this, they just don’t admit it.”

Well, it may be fair to say that “most people” do this (have multiple personality) if by “people” you are referring to novelists only. As I have previously said, I would guess that 90% of novelists have multiple personality (a normal version of it). But most of the general public don’t (only 30% has the normal version, and 1.5% the mental disorder).

In the last third of the novel, Gillian Flynn does not make a point of Amy’s multiple personality. (Except that Amy abruptly changes her mind and doesn’t kill herself, since, evidently, only one of her personalities was suicidal.) This suggests that the author’s earlier clues and references to multiple personality were just her conception of normal psychology, based on knowing herself, another great novelist. [At the time this post was written, the blog was called, "Great Novelists have Multiple Personality.]

1. Gillian Flynn. Gone Girl. New York, Crown Publishers, 2012.