In his book titled Graphs, Maps, and Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, Franco Moretti discusses the importance of narrative spaces, and in particular, he stresses that our understanding of characters’ relationships to their environment can alter the way that we think about a text. In creating literary maps, we can “find […] occurrences [from a text], place them in space,” and extricate “’emerging’ qualities, which were not visible at the lower level” (Moretti 53). Thus, any attempt to explore and probe the world which literary characters inhabit, especially characters’ thoughts or feelings regarding this physical space, can potentially result in more nuanced literary analyses. By focusing on literary space and character movement through a text, we can further question how an author’s construction of such a literary world informs character motivations and reveals underlying “qualities” that are not explicitly given to the reader by narration or speech.
Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl relies heavily on place and movement as facets of narrative suspense and as indicators of characters’ personality or socioeconomic status. Nick and Amy Dunne’s movements through the text’s literary space enable Flynn to construct the novel’s central mystery plot. For most of the novel, Amy’s existence in this space (specifically in Nick’s hometown of North Carthage, where they currently live) is put in question when she disappears. Where is she? Is she even alive? Her ostensible removal from the literary world of North Carthage renders Nick’s movement through space even more significant. In fact, his movement from one place to another becomes key to the law enforcement’s (and the public’s) perception of Nick’s motivation as a potential suspect in Amy’s death. His claim that he went to the “beach-head” at the banks of the Mississippi River on the morning of Amy’s disappearance ultimately serves as his tenuous alibi, one which he cannot substantiate with witnesses. Thus, space and movement become essential elements for the narrative’s unraveling of the mystery surrounding Amy and revealing ambiguities regarding Nick’s own innocence. Further, narrative space in Gone Girl creates a divide between classes, as well as a figurative divide that will eventually cause tension in Nick and Amy’s marriage. Perhaps the two main locations of interest are North Carthage, Nick’s sleepy Missouri hometown and site of his present-day marital home, and New York City, where Nick and Amy initially met, married, and lived until losing their jobs and most of their money. As Nick persuades (or perhaps forces) Amy to relocate from the bustling, exciting city to live near his family in Missouri, their marriage begins to crumble from within. The two characters seem to represent their respective cities; when Amy must conform to the quiet suburban life that suits Nick and his family, she grows bitter and resentful. This spatial tension then translates into emotional tension between the novel’s main characters, and it informs the way that we understand their motivations towards and perspectives of one another.
Narrative points of view are crucial in the novel’s construction of space; as the novel switches back and forth from Nick’s narration to Amy’s written diary entries, we can see the juxtaposing relationships to space that each character holds. This is particularly clear in their descriptions of the town of North Carthage, Missouri, New York City, and even smaller spaces like Nick and Amy’s North Carthage home.
As I wrote above, Nick seems to embody the characteristics of his hometown and clearly identifies with North Carthage, Missouri, as a comforting, familiar space. North Carthage is a fictional town invented by Gillian Flynn, though inspired by real-life Kansas City, Missouri, and thus, the reader can recognize the invented literary space as one which could represent reality, which could exist in our own lives. When Nick loses his position as a magazine writer in New York City, a call from his sister Margo immediately transports him back to “good ole North Carthage […] from the house where we grew up” (Flynn 5). Even this imagining of place, where he begins to internally visualize his sister at ten years old, precipitates Nick and Amy’s eventual move back to Missouri, and it reveals Nick’s own yearning to return to his childhood. North Carthage, for Nick, represents his past and becomes a space available to him as a safety net. However, Nick’s narration regarding North Carthage predominantly revolves around his perception of Amy’s disdain towards the small town, and ultimately, his own feelings of inadequacy in her eyes. He recalls that Amy, on arriving at their new North Carthage home, asks, “Should I remove my soul before I come inside?” (4). In describing his perspective on Amy’s response to his hometown, Nick carefully constructs the alignment between himself and North Carthage, where Amy’s rejection of the town reveals a rejection of her husband. He states that Amy “didn’t care to know my family, didn’t want to know my birthplace, and yet for some reason, I thought moving home would be a good idea” (6). The home they move into, one that Nick “aspired to as a kid,” is also one which Amy “detest[s]” and “used to mock” (4). Flynn provides these narrative portrayals of space, which occur in the first few pages of the novel, to immediately the friction between Nick and Amy which will drive the subsequent mystery plot.
Amy’s rejection of the average suburban home, and especially the familial bonds which Nick associates with North Carthage, alienates her from the space and further weakens the already feeble (and superficial) relationship with Nick. In her “fictional” diary entries and in her “real” narrative voice, Amy’s sentiment towards North Carthage is largely the same. With her feigned diary, she writes that she is “leaving New York. We are going to Missouri […] It is surreal […] It’s just so far from what I pictured. When I pictured my life” (100). Later, in what she identifies as her own, real voice, she bitterly imagines the stories in New York that would be told as she “let herself be dragged, penniless, to the middle of the country, where her husband threw her over for a younger woman” (234). She resents the way that she was given no other option, and no assistance from her parents, who “let Nick bundle me off to Missouri like I was some piece of chattel, some mail-order bride, some property exchange” (238). In her constructed diary, she equates her move from New York to Missouri to that of a “doomed [Victorian] heroine” who is “forced to leave her ancestral home” (102). As revealed by both Nick and Amy, Amy’s life essentially comes to a stand-still in North Carthage; she does not start working again, and her life resembles that of a domestic housewife. Thus, her descriptions of and movements in North Carthage help Gillian Flynn establish the reasoning behind Amy’s eventual disappearance, or rather, the flight from her unfulfilling marital life with Nick. She is socially and economically isolated in North Carthage, and her narrative reflects this. In contrast to Nick’s deriving comfort from the town, its familiarity and quietness providing a reprieve, Amy’s descriptions of the town depict the ways in which she feels stifled, alone, and unsatisfied. Nick’s home is not her own.
As Nick identifies with North Carthage, Amy identifies with New York. Nick even establishes the alignment between Amy and the literary New York space of Gone Girl; when he describes his decision to uproot their life and move to Missouri, he writes that he “simply assumed I would bundle up my New York wife with her New York interests, her New York pride, and remove her from her New York parents – leave the frantic, thrilling futureland of Manhattan behind” (6). Here, Amy’s entire identity, as constructed by Nick, depends upon place, New York and Manhattan, and Nick’s identification of Amy as such subtly reveals his own narrative efforts to dissociate himself from her. Nick argues that her “New York interests,” reliant on her inhabiting a space entirely different from North Carthage, are the cause of the ensuing “misery” of their life in Missouri (6). In her diary, she writes fondly about the “Brooklyn brownstone” where she and Nick first lived as a married couple, and she recollects one night in which they “sat on the old Persian rug, drinking wine and listening to vinyl scratches as the sky wen dark and Manhattan switched on” (39). Though these diary entries have been written to create a sympathetic Amy figure for the police, there seems to be elements of truth that she laces within her artificial written narrative. In particular, her fondness of New York and her yearning for a different space to inhabit seem to ring true. Further, her written narrative establishes the importance of space as a factor in their marital divide; she reminisces on a better, faster, and more interesting life that she and Nick shared in New York. By contrast, she often sits alone in their North Carthage home, while Nick sneaks around his Missouri hometown to cheat with college student Andie. The conflict between spaces, and characters’ relationships to spaces, augments the conflict occurring between Nick and Amy’s competing narrative voices, and thus, the author’s utilization of literary place provides another facet of character which complicates analysis.
Works Cited:
Flynn, Gillian. Gone Girl. Random House LLC, 2012.
Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, and Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. Verso, 2007.