Summary
The hurricane lands, inflicting severe damage on Ashecliffe. Much of the compound is flooded, and Cawley’s home loses half of its roof. Teddy and Chuck realize that this means that the electric fencing protecting Ward C is down, and they decide to sneak in, while they are in the eye of the hurricane, and still dressed as orderlies. They have to be careful; now that Rachel has been found, their presence anywhere except the dormitory suspicious.
They enter Ward C, pretending to be sent to help clear up the water damage. The atmosphere in Ward C is one of total lunacy, with inmates running around and orderlies chasing after them. The main hall of Ward C reminds Teddy uncannily of the dream in which he encountered Rachel and Dolores. They encounter a man in pajama pants who tags Teddy “it” and mentions a new weapon called the hydrogen bomb, which does not explode, but rather implodes—a weapon of breakdown and collapse. They reach a staircase, where a patient has gotten free of a guard, and slashes his face. They help subdue him. Out of gratitude, the guard, Fred Baker, allows them to access to the prisoners.
Surmising that the administrative offices of Ward C are upstairs, Teddy and Chuck separate, with Chuck going upstairs, and Teddy downstairs to find Laeddis. Talking his way past another orderly, Teddy finds a man in the dark cells below, scrawling on the wall. The man accuses Teddy of failing him.
Coming closer with the match light, Teddy recognizes George Noyce. He appears to have been badly beaten, and as they speak, Noyce keeps saying Laeddis’s name, and insists that everything going on is about Teddy and Laeddis. Noyce accuses Teddy of betraying him, bemoans the fact he will never get out—his paranoia is intense, and he points out that Teddy has never been alone since he got on Shutter Island, that he’s been assigned a partner he’s never worked with before. He begs Teddy to save him, and says that he’s going to be taken to the lighthouse to have his brain cut out. He says that the only way that Teddy can succeed is to let Dolores go.
Teddy makes his way out and considers what Noyce has said. He concedes to himself that he has not, in fact, been left alone for any period of time that he’s been on the island. He and Chuck reconvene in the hall, where they are almost spotted by a guard, but they are able to slip out undetected. Suspicious of Chuck, Teddy tests him by trying to get him to slip up about his story, but the details of Chuck’s story remain consistent.
Teddy and Chuck try to make their way to the lighthouse, but because the most direct route, the woods, are flooded, they get lost. At a cliff, Teddy is able to locate more rocks in code on the beach below. He proceeds to climb down, but as the climb is treacherous because of the storm, Chuck refuses to come with him. Counting the stones, the code reads M-U-Y-R-A-E-H-O-I. By the time Teddy makes his way back up, night has fallen, and he discovers that Chuck is missing.
Teddy spots what he believes to be Chuck’s body at the bottom of the cliff. He regrets having suspected Chuck, and is struck with memories of other soldiers he’d known during the war. He sees a piece of paper between the rocks, and realizes that it is Laeddis’s intake form. He is stricken with guilt at the possibility that Chuck died trying to rescue it.
Coming closer, he realizes that what he thought was Chuck’s body is in fact a rock covered with seaweed. He finds himself surrounded by rats—Shutter Island is covered with them. He manages to overcome his disgust and gradually make his way up until among the cliffs. There, he spots a light coming from one of the caves. Inside, he discovers a woman in a patient’s drawstring pants and slippers.
It turns out to be Rachel Solando—the real Rachel Solando. She explains that she used to be a doctor at the facility, but that she began to challenge the hospital’s policies, especially lobotomies. She explains that the purpose of the experiments is to create soldiers who feel no remorse, need no sleep, and feel no pain. When she questioned this plan, she was locked up as a patient to keep her from speaking out. She adds that it is impossible to convince someone that one isn’t crazy, because that’s precisely what a crazy person would say.
She also warns Teddy that he’s been medicated the entire time that he’s been here. The cigarettes he’s accepted from Cawley, the food, the water, the pills, all contain psychoactive substances. She warns him not to go to sleep. The pills have also been causing his migraines. The sign that full insanity is setting in will be when he loses control of his thumbs. He realizes that the shoe polish that came off onto his thumbs when he met the fake Rachel Solando was in fact hair dye. She tells him to trust no one, and insists he leave, lest she be found.
Back on the grounds, Teddy encounters the warden he saw on the first day. The warden is open about his disdain for Teddy and calls him vermin, a nigger. He says that Teddy is base and violent, that society barely covers the violence lurking in each person. He says that he looks forward to their final conversation.
When Teddy returns, the dormitory is abandoned. The entire staff is at a meeting. He speaks to Cawley, who offers him a cigarette, which he refuses. Cawley says that he has learned that an unidentified man got into Ward C, and that this stranger got into a conversation with a known schizophrenic named George Noyce. Teddy asks him if they have a patient here named Andrew Laeddis, Cawley says no. Teddy mentions that “they” will be leaving. Cawley doesn’t understand. Teddy clarifies that he means his partner, but Cawley says he has no partner, that he arrived on the island alone.
Teddy is about to protest, but remembers Rachel Solando’s warning, and does not insist, for fear that he will be considered insane. Teddy returns to the ward, where he makes conversation with a black orderly named Trey Washington. The orderly, who has also fought in the war, confirms that Teddy arrived on the island alone. Teddy repeats the warden’s racist remarks, and taunts the orderly for taking his orders. His pride hurt, the orderly tells Teddy that he needs to get off the island and that there is a ferry leaving the next morning. He describes to Teddy where the electric fence has been disabled by the storm. Teddy leaves, but as he does, he realizes that his thumbs have begun to twitch.
Analysis
The third chapter decisively shifts Teddy and Chuck’s relationship to Ashecliffe hospital, and to one another. In the previous two chapters, Teddy and Chuck are figures of authority, who have the right to go wherever they want, to ask whatever questions they please. Once Rachel Solando is found, however, they have no ostensible reason for being on Shutter Island. Without their clothing, badges and guns, they have been incorporated into the institution. At first, Teddy finds this reversal liberating, as it grants him access to Ward C, where he is able to search for Andrew Laeddis and speak to Noyce when the hurricane hits. But by the end of the chapter, once order has been restored, Teddy is at the mercy of the institution and its rules.
Lehane heightens this reversal by removing other aspects of the story that we have been using to anchor ourselves. One major reversal is the sudden absence of Chuck. Chuck serves two major functions in the novel. First, he gives Teddy a sounding board against which he can try theories and test the soundness of his reasoning. Secondly, his ease with everyone at the asylum, from the inmates to the staff, provides a valuable link to humanity for Teddy, who is perpetually on the verge of being swallowed by the trauma of the war and his grief over his wife’s death. The absence of Chuck, and the suspicion planted by Noyce that he might have been working against Teddy all along, snaps an important tether to reality for Teddy.
Not only is Teddy now powerless, but after his conversation with Dr. Rachel Solando, he is increasingly unmoored. The presence of the “real” Rachel Solando opens up the possibility that literally no one at Ashecliffe is who they claim to be. This causes the reader, and Teddy, to question all of the information and characterization that has been carefully established up until now. Her insinuation that the hospital’s medication can be transmitted through literally any object, from food to cigarettes, causes the reader to revisit every interaction that he has taken place so far.
Rachel also introduces a deeper theme about sanity and power: namely, that the doctors at the institution have the power dictate reality, because they can simply declare anyone who disagrees with them insane. Power is truth—not a welcome realization for Teddy at a moment when he is utterly powerless.
Lehane makes use of that powerlessness to bring Teddy into line with the marginalized people on Shutter Island, namely, the orderlies, who are black, and who do the unpleasant work of subduing the patients, as well as the janitorial duties on the island. Teddy’s conversations with Trey Washington and the warden reminds the reader that the America of Shutter Island is an openly racist one. Washington, too, was a solider, who fought in a segregated army. He is less shocked by the brutality of the war because it conforms with his everyday experience as an African-American. Teddy’s encounter with the warden, meanwhile, suggests that beneath the veneer of civility, humanity, and prosperity espoused by Dr. Cawley, and by American society at large, there lies a barely-concealed brutality.
