









































Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel Gone Girl, as well 
as the 2014 movie adaptation, portrays 
the story of a wife, Amy, whose suppressed 
resentment in a dysfunctional marriage 
that caused her to frame her husband, Nick, 
for her murder. The story takes the audience 
through the plot of the disappearance 
and investigation through the alternating 
perspectives of the two spouses. Amy’s 
accounts of their relationship initially 
paints Nick as guilty, but it later reveals that 
the entire disappearance was a ploy, meant 
to convince the public of his faults while 
uplifting Amy’s character. This essay seeks 
to use rhetorical criticism to analyze the 
persuasive devices of emotional appeal, 
credible identity, and logical reasoning 
utilized by Amy Dunne’s character to 
manipulate other characters and media 
into believing that her husband killed her. 
It will also analyze how she uses those same 
rhetorical devices to attempt to convince 
the readers that her actions in framing her 
husband for her murder were justified. This 

analysis won’t solely focus on how she goes 
about persuading the characters, media, 
and the audience; It will also analyze why 
it was so easy for her to do so. As a result, 
this essay will use sociological criticism 
to reveal the power that mass media and 
public perception hold in regard to criminal 
justice cases, and how this pressure from 
the media corresponds with a present-
day bias favoring privileged white women 
in America’s criminal justice system.

The Art of Persuasion: A 
Rhetorical Analysis of Amy 

Dunne’s Narration in Gone Girl 

Ellen Bain, Ball State University

28



The crime fiction fiction genre is an overarching space of literature that tends to 
focus on the art of careful investigation and problem-solving in relation to a crime, 
highlighting the good of society versus the darker, more sinister side. In many cases, 
these pieces of fiction tend to reflect aspects of our real lives, using written pieces of 
fiction to reveal the unspoken truths of society. This is emphasized in the theoretical 
framework of the sociological criticism of literature, which considers modern societal 
issues and their influence on a written piece (Blanchard). This framework, along with 
rhetorical criticism—which interprets the persuasive arts used in a communicative 
act —serves as the foundation of this essay’s examination of the 2012 novel Gone Girl 
by Gillian Flynn as well as its 2014 movie adaptation (Leeman). Throughout the novel, 
Amy’s narration utilizes rhetorical elements of emotional appeal (pathos), credibility as 
a victim (ethos), and logic (logos) to effectively manipulate the media and characters 
in the novel to believe that her husband committed the murder. Furthermore, she uses 
these same rhetorical devices to justify her actions to the reader in the second half 
of the novel. The overall ease and effectiveness of Amy’s ability to skew the criminal 
investigation through the manipulation of mass media reveals the influence that 
media pressure has over criminal justice cases. Furthermore, it reveals a larger issue of 
the impact of public perception in the legal system, which very often lends itself to a 
societal bias towards privileged white women in America.  
 The plot of Gone Girl revolves around the mysterious disappearance of 
antagonist Amy Elliot-Dunne, who is suspected of being killed by her husband, 
Nick Dunne. With alternating first-person perspectives between Amy and Nick, 
the audience is taken through the criminal investigation regarding Amy Dunne’s 
disappearance during the past and present days of the relationship, initially painting 
Nick as the prime suspect. The novel is set up to follow the traditional form of a 
“whodunit,” which is the mystery subgenre that takes the audience through the puzzle 
of discovering the truth behind the crime by planting clues throughout the piece. 
As the novel reaches the halfway point, the story breaks the traditional form of a 
whodunit when the narrator reveals that the disappearance was a ploy set up by Amy 
to get back at her husband for being unfaithful. Ultimately, she returns home after 
fabricating yet another story of false kidnapping by an ex-boyfriend, whom she ends 
up murdering to keep up the appearance of her elaborate story. Although she admits 
her crimes to Nick, the truth of Amy’s actions is never revealed to the public, nor is she 
ever formally penalized for murder, fraud, and defamation of her husband. The story 
ends with the couple spiraling into an even more toxic relationship, in which Amy 
manipulates Nick into continuing their marriage by revealing that she is pregnant with 
his child, which she announces in a tense scene in front of a talk show host.  

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 One of the most imperative factors in Amy Dunne’s ability to persuade others 
to believe her story is her manipulation of the media. As Ahmed Hussein states, “Amy 
displays an obsession with making the people she abhors constantly suffer the ‘wrath 
of public opinion’” (146). In other words, Amy uses the media and the public’s negative 
opinions to punish those that have wronged her, especially her husband Nick. To do so, 
she places her own public identity at odds with Nick’s, creating a situation in which the 
press must choose one side or the other. Out of all the rhetorical appeals that she uses, 
establishing credibility (ethos) is perhaps the easiest for her to accomplish, but is also 
one of the most important as it serves as the driving force behind the investigation 
and overall public outlook on the case. As Phillip and Steidly state in their article, “the 
likelihood that a defendant accused of a death-eligible murder will be sentenced to 
death is three times greater if the case involves a white female victim.” This statistic is 
especially important in Amy’s case because she utilizes this knowledge to sway the 
case in her favor. By framing her husband as the murderer, she is stripping him of all his 
credibility in depicting him as a criminal.   
 Opposedly, Amy is a well-educated, wealthy white woman who is well known 
by many in the story due to her being the inspiration for the popular children’s book 
Amazing Amy. As her character mentions in the novel, the book character “Amy is the 
Elliot bread and butter, and she’s served us well…” (Flynn, 26). So well, in fact, that Amy 
mentions her trust fund of nearly $800,000 provided by her parents to “make me feel 
secure enough so I didn’t need to make choices based on money—in schooling, in 
career” (Flynn 86). These lines point to the lifestyle that she was raised in, confirming 
the notion that she has been positioned very highly in society in terms of class and 
race. Furthermore, the character of Amazing Amy serves as a mirror to reflect good 
traits onto Amy’s character in the eye of the public. Amy herself describes Amazing 
Amy as “my literary alter ego, my paper-bound better half, the me I was supposed to 
be” (Flynn 26), proving that the character in the novel is meant to be a more idealized 
and loved version of herself. This then allows Amy to take on the fictitious persona of 
Amazing Amy in the eyes of the public, “adopting the heroine’s traits of perfection and 
female virtue [to] establish her appeal to an audience” (Vouza 40). As such, there is an 
inclination by society to automatically believe her side of the story without question 
because of the reputation that has been constructed through the media, which greatly 
impacts the way that her “murder” case is perceived by the nation.  
 An additional layer of an appeal to ethos that Amy Dunne uses is directed 
towards both the characters of the story and the readers themselves. The narration 
of Gone Girl shifts perspectives, going back and forth from Nick’s view to Amy’s 
view. While Nick’s narration is through a first-person depiction of his inner thoughts, 
Amy uses a reflective, diary entry to depict her life leading up to and after her 

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disappearance. The form of epistolary, or diary, writing is an especially effective tool 
for persuasive storytelling because it is “particularly effective at producing reactions 
of sympathy, since [it] encourages extradiegetic readers to respond to intradiegetic 
writing” (Snyder IV). In other words, writing in this way prompts the audience that 
exists outside the fictional world to critically and emotionally interpret events that 
happen within the fictional realm, causing them to accept it as truth. Upon reading 
Amy’s diary, the audience is under the impression that they are gaining insight on the 
innermost personal thoughts of the victim leading up to the crime.  
 However, we later discover that the narration the audience sees through the 
diary entries is meticulously set up to uplift Amy while incriminating Nick Dunne. 
By carefully injecting false scenarios and fears in her diary entries, it’s extremely 
convincing to the readers that he committed the crime, as they initially read the diary 
entries with no other context than Amy’s recollections. As Amy reveals in the novel, “I 
wrote her carefully, Diary Amy. She is designed to appeal to the cops, to appeal to the 
public should portions be released” (Flynn 238). This line reveals the intricate ways in 
which Amy purposely manipulates her identity, fragmenting “Diary Amy” as an entirely 
separate entity from her actual self. According to Isavella Vouza, Amy uses the diary to 
demonstrate her belief that “selfhood is not something that one is but something that 
one does” (39). Rather than completely transforming herself into the likable persona 
that the public wants, she puts on a performance of sorts to create a different persona 
compiled of traits that she knows will appeal to both the reader and the characters in 
the novel.  
 In her explanations of staging her husband’s crime, it is apparent that Amy is 
acutely aware that to have any credibility in framing her husband, she needs to make 
herself a sympathetic victim beyond the scope of reasonable doubt. During the 
criminal investigation, Amy knows that she must make both the detectives and the 
public relate to her through the struggles she endures at the hands of her husband. As 
a result, Amy’s use of logical appeal to the detectives is crucial to establish herself as 
a victim in their eyes. One of the main ways in which she establishes a logical appeal 
to the detectives is by manipulating a staged crime scene. According to Bitton and 
Dayan, “the most common victim–offender relationship involving HSS [homicide 
scene staging] is an intimate partner relationship, and most staged homicidal scenes 
involve the killing of an intimate partner” (1056). In other words, most cases in which 
the crime scene is altered relate to the murder of intimate domestic partners, such as 
a husband or boyfriend. This is something that Amy’s character capitalizes on and uses 
for the basis of staging the home crime scene; she creates a scene that is believable 
at first glance but has deeply obvious flaws which signal to law enforcement that her 
husband, Nick, is a strong suspect in her disappearance.  

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 Amy manipulates this statistical evidence of crime scene staging by pointedly 
setting up her home in such a way that leaves a breadcrumb trail for investigators, 
prompting them to look deeper into the crime. She expresses this notion in the movie 
adaptation through a voiceover by emphasizing the importance of “Meticulously 
[staging] your crime scene with just enough mistakes to raise the specter of doubt.” 
(Gone Girl 1:08:38-1:08:41). Along with selectively destroyed furniture that presented 
indications of struggle, Amy further increases her appeal to the investigators’ sense 
of logic by using unmitigable DNA evidence to stage the scene. According to Steven 
Lee, DNA is often referred to as the “silent witness,” as it is the only concrete way to 
place or connect someone with a crime (2). As such, Amy is intentional in using her 
own blood on the floor of the kitchen to frame her husband. She expresses in Flynn’s 
novel that after cutting herself, she “cleaned it up as poorly as Nick would have done 
after he bashed my head in” (220). This was done because Amy knew that the forensics 
team would come to the logical conclusion that her husband was trying to cover up 
the murder once they discovered the cleaned-up blood via blue light and luminol—an 
organic compound commonly used by forensic teams to discover blood and other 
human fluids on crime scenes. These two factors that contributed to a staged scene in 
the home are very effective in their appeals to the detectives’ deductive reasoning by 
manipulating the crime scene in a way that would make sense in a typical domestic 
disappearance investigation.  
 A staged crime scene was only one part of what Amy Dunne altered to what was 
deemed as common sense to the detectives; another approach she took in appealing 
to the detectives’ common sense was by creating false incentives for her husband to 
kill her. To give more validity and probable cause to her husband killing her, she had 
to make the marriage appear troubled. Amy had extremely effective ways of going 
about this. In building up to her big reveal, Amy constructed a marriage riddled with 
money problems. She explains in the first half of the novel how they are first burdened 
with “his-and-her-layoffs” as well as Nick’s spending of her trust fund money to fund 
their sudden move to Missouri and to purchase a bar (Flynn 85). Furthermore, as the 
investigation into her disappearance continues, she makes countless purchases that 
would put their credit cards into massive debt. As she expresses in the film through 
flashbacks of the initial stages of her plan, she must keep up appearances and 
“Secretly create some money troubles: credit cards, perhaps online gambling” (Gone 
Girl 1:07:13-1:07:17). She takes it a step further in making it seem that her husband 
signed off on raising her life insurance a few months prior to going missing: “With the 
help of the unwitting, bump up your life insurance” (Gone Girl 1:07:20-1:07:24). By 
doing this, Amy was able to sway the characters and the audience in her favor because 
there are tangible documents that can be used as proof of incentive for the husband 

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32



committing the crime. In hindsight, audiences see a husband who made their money 
troubles worse by spending thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of purchases 
and signing off on life insurance right before the disappearance of his wife. This would 
lead any rational person, including the audience, to believe he is guilty.   
 The same can be said about her appeal to the detectives, by creating numerous 
means of evidence that would force them to make the most logical conclusion 
in the investigation. Amy continues this notion with the reader, as she goes on to 
explain that what she is doing to her husband is justified. A famous line from the 
film adaptation explains her reasoning as such: “Nick Dunne took my pride and my 
dignity and my hope and my money. He took and took from me until I no longer 
existed. That’s murder. Let the punishment fit the crime” (Gone Girl 1:06:36-1:06:48). It 
is evident from the text that Amy Dunne elicits the audience’s emotions by depicting 
how Nick Dunne went about ruining her life, financially and emotionally. Even with 
the given knowledge that she is actively trying to incriminate her husband, she is 
appealing to the reader’s empathy by explaining that she is essentially getting back at 
him because of what he did to her. In her mind, Nick’s infidelity with another woman 
after all that they invested into their marriage is the same as ending her life. She’s using 
this reasoning to explain that potentially sentencing him to the same fate is within the 
lines of just punishment.  
 This analysis of Amy’s ease in her ability to use rhetorical devices to persuade 
the literary audience reflects some of the larger societal issues that come into play 
regarding privilege in criminal justice cases. The investigation and media coverage 
of Amy’s case in Gone Girl is a clear example of the sense of urgency and importance 
that white female victims receive in criminal cases in comparison to other citizens of 
the country. A study done by professors at the University of Denver in the department 
of Sociology and Criminology supports this notion, stating that “white females were 
victims in 36% of the approximately 1,000 cases in which capital defendants were 
sentenced to death.” The same study also found that “an execution was 2.8 times more 
likely in cases with a white female victim than one would expect in a system that is 
blind to race and gender” (Phillips et al.). These statistics regarding the execution of 
perpetrators committing crimes against white women suggest that there are harsher 
repercussions in our justice system when the victim of the crime is a white woman. 
Furthermore, in violent crimes like this where the victim is a white woman, media 
outlets exert more outrage and pressure than they would with victims of other 
demographics.  
 The bias found in the justice system can be attributed to the combination of two 
things: the white privilege that makes their life more of a concern to the public, and 
the media’s desire to deliver an entertaining story. Beale explains this phenomenon, 

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stating: 

The news media are not mirrors, simply reflecting events in society. Rather, media 
content is shaped by economic and marketing considerations that override traditional 
journalistic criteria for newsworthiness. In the case of network news, this strategy 
results in much greater coverage of crime, especially murder, with a heavy emphasis 
on long-running, tabloid style treatment of selected cases. (401) 

This idea of network news focusing on ‘long-running, tabloid style treatment of 
selected cases’ works perfectly for the media because newscasts can make their own 
perceptions of criminal cases. If it’s within reasonable rationale with the evidence 
provided, newscasts have freedom in how they convey cases, regardless of the 
objective truth of the matter.  
 The manipulation of media based on societal biases was the driving force behind 
Amy’s plot in Gone Girl. News stations were able to create a seemingly clear-cut story 
of a husband who killed his pregnant wife, despite the manipulation that was at play 
behind the scenes of this crime. Because of the utilization of her privilege as a white 
female “victim,” it was easy for Amy to convince everyone in the novel, including the 
readers, to go along with her side of the story. Additionally, the shock factor of the 
story allowed it to garner enough attention from the nation to also be pressured by 
the opinions of common people, despite the investigation still being ongoing. In this 
way, the power of the media was able to correspond with Amy Dunne’s status as a 
privileged white woman, effectively influencing the detectives, the consumers, and 
the criminal case itself. This ease in her execution of the revenge plot proves that, in 
our society, the media has too much influence over criminal cases and investigations. 
Too often, it alters the sense of unbiased reasoning in criminal cases by creating 
incriminating narratives in advance based on preconceived notions of who the victims 
are. 

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34



 Works Cited 

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News Promotes Punitiveness.”  William & Mary Law Review, vol. 48, no. 2, 2006, 
scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1103&context=wmlr. 

Blanchard, Robert. “Social Criticism and Their Types.” International Scholars Journal, vol. 
11, no. 1, 1 Mar. 2022, www.internationalscholarsjournals.com/articles/social-
criticism-and-their-types-86417.html.  

Fincher, David, director. Gone Girl. Twentieth Century Fox, 2014.  

Flynn, Gillian. Gone Girl: A Novel. First edition. New York, Crown, 2012. 

Hussein, Ahmed. “Patriarchal Potency in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.” Adalya Journal, vol. 9, 
no. 6, June 2020, doi.org/10.37896/aj9.6/016.  

Lee, Steven B. Collecting DNA Evidence at Property Crime Scenes. San Jose University, 
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