Cawley, behind them, placed a record on the phonograph and the scratch of the needle was followed by stray pops and hisses that reminded him of the phones he'd tried to use. Then a balm of strings and piano replaced the hisses. Something classical, Teddy knew that. Prussian. Reminding him of cafes overseas and a record collection he'd seen in the office of a sub-commandant at Dachau, the man listening to it when he'd shot himself in the mouth.
This quote is important as it shows a great deal about both Teddy and Dr. Cawley. It illustrates how much horror and death Teddy has seen, and also that his experience liberating the concentration camp at Dachau has stayed with him as if it happened yesterday. It shows that Dr. Cawley's experimental psychiatry and obsession with violence makes him similar to the Nazi doctors who experimented on prisoners for the sake of experimenting. Like the Nazi doctors, Cawley thinks his science is more important than the welfare of people. The quote also highlights the juxtaposition of appreciation for beauty and the ability to create horror, with both the doctor and the commandant able to take pleasure in the beauty of classical music while also committing brutal violence.
At Dachau, the SS guards surrendered to us. Five hundred of them. Now there were reporters there, but they'd seen all the bodies piled up at the train station too. They could smell exactly what we were smelling. They looked at us and they wanted us to do what we did. And we sure as hell wanted to do it. So we executed every one of those fucking Krauts. Disarmed them, leaned them against walls, executed them.
Teddy is explaining to Chuck why he decided that he would only kill in self-defense, having felt remorse for executing the Nazi guards at Dachau despite having been driven to it by what he could see and smell, and the belief that anyone would do the same. The statement also brings up the philosophical point that runs throughout the novel, which is whether the public at large would feel sorry for the prisoners at Shutter Island given the heinous and graphically horrific crimes they had committed.
If you are deemed insane, then all actions that would otherwise prove you are not do, in actuality, fall into the framework of an insane person's actions. Your sound protests constitute denial. Your valid fears are deemed paranoia. Your survival instincts are labelled defense mechanisms. It's a no-win situation.
The female doctor has summed up the problem that Teddy appears to be having in proving his sanity to Dr. Cawley, and is also explaining how the directors of Shutter Island are able to neutralize anyone who proves to be a threat to their operation. For example, George Noyce, who spoke up about their practices, was transferred back to Shutter Island where his fears were deemed paranoia and his accusations deemed hallucinations.
"In a less enlightened age, a patient like Gryce would have been put to death. But here they can study him, define a pathology, maybe isolate the abnormality in his brain that causes him to disengage so completely from acceptable patterns of behaviour. If they can do that, maybe we can reach the day where that kind of disengagement can be rooted out of society entirely."
Warden McPherson expresses the mission statement of Ashecliffe, and attempts to make a case for the confinement and medical study that goes on there as a step forward in humanity. This quote gives us Ashecliffe's mission statement, allowing the reader to see what goes on there from the perspective of the doctors, who do not see themselves at all as tormentors or murderers, but rather as humanitarians working to perfect society.
"I said you were men of violence. That's not the same as accusing you of being violent men [...] Since the schoolyard, I'll bet neither of you has ever walked away from physical conflict. That's not to suggest you enjoyed it, only that retreat wasn't something you considered an option. Yes?"
Dr. Naehring introduces the notion that, because of their war experience, Teddy and Chuck are both prone to violence, that every major event in their life, from their war service to their public service as U.S. Marshals, has been steeped in violence. Teddy resists this characterization, and hates being analyzed, but over the course of the novel, Dr. Naehring's assessment proves to be true, as Teddy struggles with the acts of violence he committed—as a soldier, a marshal, and a husband.
"God gives us earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes. He gives us mountains that spew fire onto our heads. Oceans that swallow ships. He gives us nature, and nature is a smiling killer. He gives us disease so that in our death we believe He gave us orifices only so that we could feel our life bleed out of them. He gave us lust and fury and greed and our filthy hearts. So that we could wage violence in His honour. There is no moral order as pure as this store we've just seen. There is no moral order at all. There is only this—can my violence conquer yours?"
Commenting on the hurricane, the warden expresses the view that, as creatures of nature, human beings are fundamentally violent, and all social relations are more or less a thin veneer beneath which lurks violence. This is a view that Teddy struggles against throughout the novel, trying to get past his gruesome experiences in the war to focus on the love that he feels with his wife, cautiously embracing Dr. Cawley's humanitarian worldview, and noting the ease with people that Chuck has. The warden represents the worst part of Teddy's own fears, speaking to him and accusing him, just at the time that he feels least able to refute him.
"Teddy lay back against the rock, feeling free in a way he'd only felt as a child. He watches the sky begin to appear behind smoky mountains and he felt the air on his skin. He could smell wet leaves and wet soil and wet bark and hear the last faint ticking of the rain. He wanted to close his eyes and wake back up on the other side of the harbor, in Boston, in his bed."
This moment, which takes place immediately after Teddy and Chuck escape from Ward C, is the one moment in the entire novel in which any of the characters experience something akin to freedom. In the context of the carceral atmosphere of the novel, where both the weather, the ocean, the guards, and finally the mind itself conspire to imprison the characters, this passage is immediately striking for its sensual and palpable imagination of what freedom might feel like for Teddy.
"You drop a bomb, even an atom bomb, it explodes. Right? Right you are, but a hydrogen bomb, it implodes. It falls in on itself and goes through a series of internal breakdowns, collapsing and collapsing. But all that collapsing? It creates mass and density. See, the fury of its own self-destruction creates an entirely new monster. You get it? Do you?
Litchfield's mention of the hydrogen bomb threads together the themes of personal collapse, violence, and history. Shutter Island takes place in 1954; the hydrogen bomb was tested for the first time in 1952. Echoing the themes of personal and historical violence, Litchfield's conception of the hydrogen bomb also echoes the state of many of the patients at Ashecliffe, who, as their minds have collapsed, have gone onto create ballooning and expanding fantasies to keep from dealing with reality, lashing out with violence when that fantasy is challenged.
"Listen to me, if we fail here, we've lost. Not just with you. Right now the balance of power is in the hands of the surgeons, but that's going to change fast. The pharmacists will take over, and the results won't be any less barbaric. It'll just seem so. The same zombiefication and warehousing that are going on now will continue under a more publicly palatable veneer."
In the twist reveal at the end, Dr. Sheehan, who is revealed to have been Chuck, is explaining the stakes of Teddy's situation to him. He and Dr. Cawley have gone about setting up the events of the past four days to try and snap Teddy, who is in fact Andrew Laeddis, out of his delusions, to get him to come to grips with having killed his wife, before he is lobotomized. The quote has an undeniably tragic ring, because the contemporary reader will know that they failed, that indeed psychopharmacology has become the order of the day for psychiatric care. Dr. Sheehan and Dr. Cawley are positioned in this way as the defenders of humanity and compassion in a deeply inhumane profession, and a deeply inhumane world.
"He saw his wife in her white dress the night he'd met her and saw the look in her face that first moment of seeing her, that look he'd fallen in love with. He thought it had just been the dress, her insecurity about wearing such a fine dress in a fine club, but that wasn't it. It was terror, barely suppressed, and it was always there, of bombs, of rattling streetcars and jackhammers and dark avenues and Russians and submarines and taverns filled with angry men, oceans filled with sharks, Asians carrying red books in one hand and rifles in the other."
Here, Teddy reflects on what drew him to Dolores, and why she might have killed their children. Instead of painting Dolores as simply mad, Teddy's realization places her terror as a partly justified response at the overwhelming violence of the world, and the violence and paranoia of the moment in which they are living. The passage echoes young Teddy's nausea at the overwhelming expanse of the sea. He realizes that he was drawn to Dolores precisely because of her terror and propensity for violence, not in spite of it.
