Summary
Day Two – Laeddis
The marshals wake up and reconvene with Cawley. Teddy explains the code. All of the numbers add up to the 13. Rachel Solando appears to be obsessed with the number 13, and her name has thirteen letters. The rest of the message is simple number-to-letter assignation, with each letter standing for its number in the alphabet (A=1, B=2, etc.). “I am 47” is the name “Rachel” expressed as numbers and added together. “80” is the sum total of her last name—Teddy thinks the “they” are her husband and her children. Teddy, Chuck, and Cawley agree that “three” likely refers to her children, plus one, Rachel herself, which explains “we are four.” They are still unsure about 67. During the presentation, Teddy and Cawley are both evasive about their war experiences. Both appear to have done intelligence work.
Cawley explains that, because of the storm, there will be no ferry out that day. The switchboard is also down. He doubts that Rachel Solando is out there in the brewing storm. Teddy postulates that the letter is a guide for cracking future codes, and that there will be more on the island. He thinks that Rachel Solando has brought them, Teddy and Chuck, here. He asks for Sheehan’s personnel file, but Cawley still refuses.
Teddy and Chuck confer. They think that Cawley knows more than he is letting on. As they plan to interview the inmates, they also observe that the hospital has a suspicious staff-to-patient ratio, almost two to one.
They meet several inmates, including Ken, who keeps insisting that his feet are cold; Peter Breene, a violent-tempered young man who slashed his father’s nurse with a glass bottle, and to whom Teddy takes an instant dislike; and Leonara Grant, who believes that she is the actress Mary Pickford, that Chuck is Douglas Fairbanks, and Teddy is Charlie Chaplin. Finally, they talk to Bridget Kearns, a manic-depressive woman who killed her abusive husband with an ax. Bridget Kearns mentions that Dr. Sheehan’s was handsome, but insists that he is a good doctor. She asks for water, and when Chuck goes to get it, she scribbles something in Teddy’s notebook. When Teddy asks if she knows a patient named Andrew Laeddis, she becomes expressionless.
Speaking to Chuck afterwards, Teddy says that he believes her testimony was coached. He also confesses to Chuck that Andrew Laeddis is the man who killed his wife, an arsonist who was the maintenance man in their building.
Teddy recalls Dolores in the last year of his life. She suffered from insomnia, and had grown skittish. He recalls her begging him not to go, and trying to sleep with him, but he ignored her. The last words he told his wife were that she should get herself together and to take care of her responsibilities. He believes that Andrew Laeddis is in the highly guarded Ward C, where the most dangerous criminals are, or dead, which would point them to the cemetery. Chuck affirms that Teddy needs to kill Laeddis, and Chuck will cover for him. Teddy glances at Bridget’s note. It only says: “Run.”
The storm gathers in violence, and they make their way over to the cemetery. There, they find thirteen small piles of rocks equidistant from one another, some with more stones, some with fewer. All together, the numbers of stones in piles are: 18-1-4-9-5-4-23-1-12-4-19-14-5. Before they can investigate at length, the storm picks up in such violent intensity that they are forced to take refuge in a mausoleum. To pass the time, Chuck and Teddy once again revisit the war. Teddy again recalls the liberation of Dachau, and murdering five hundred surrendered guards. The reflect on the terrible weight of the violence, and how it is incommunicable to someone who hasn’t gone through it.
Teddy reveals that he has some information about Ashecliffe. It is largely funded by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Some of the experimental treatments involve new drugs like LSD, mescaline, and phencyclidine, hallucinogens that warp reality. Teddy observes that regular exposure to such a drug makes the distinction between madness and sanity impossible—even a totally sane person could begin hallucinating things that weren’t real, like a schizophrenic. Teddy believes that there is a test group at Ashecliffe being given these drugs to see how their brains react. He reveals that he has been sent by a Senator Hurly from New Hampshire to gather information on the hospital. He also reveals that Laeddis has been transferred here, but there’s no evidence of his being admitted. A patient named George Noyce is also here, who stabbed several people in Attleboro. He had received treatment at Ashecliffe after a violent, but otherwise unremarkable incident with a professor at College. He was transferred to Ward C, and emerged insane. Teddy’s goal, in addition to finding Laeddis, is to expose Ashecliffe.
At this point, they are found and rescued by Warden McPherson. The storm has become a full-on hurricane. The warden returns them to Dr. Cawley. Because their clothes are soaked through, they are given orderlies’ uniforms. They attend a meeting with Cawley and the other doctors, where Cawley and one other man are outvoted on a patient’s treatment. The doctors are concerned about the safety of Ward C, whose security measures might be destroyed by the hurricane—Cawley is against restraining the patients for fear they might drown, but the other doctors are willing to accept to the risk.
Teddy interrupts the meeting to explain that he has cracked the final bit of Rachel’s puzzle, “Who is 67?” There are 66 patients in the facility. 67 suggests that there is an extra one. Cawley rejects this solution, but Teddy believes he is right. He is interrupted by Naehring, who reveals that Rachel Solando has been returned to her cell that day.
Cawley takes the marshals to interview Rachel Solando. As Cawley has indicated, Rachel is under the impression that nothing has happened, that her husband is away, that the children are out playing, and that all of the visitors are simply mailmen and grocery delivery boys. Teddy pretends to be a police officer asking about the whereabouts of someone distributing Communist literature. She claims to have gone about her day as usual, then taken off her clothes and gone for a swim in the lake, and afterwards made thirteen small sand castles.
As Rachel speaks, she speaks to Teddy as though he is her husband. She reminds Teddy uncannily of Dolores. When Teddy asks what she did after she swam in the lake, she says in front of everyone that he licked her dry. Teddy tries to calm her down by holding her face with tenderness, but he recognizes that it is inappropriate. He is able to regain his self-possession, and asks what she did after that. Rachel tells Teddy that she buried him after he was killed in the war. She suddenly turns on him, calling him a rapist, and threatens to kill him. She is so angry that she has to be restrained.
Back in Cawley’s office, Cawley explains that Rachel was found on the beach near the lighthouse. Teddy is deeply shaken by the experience, and begins suffering another migraine. Cawley offers him two yellow pills. Teddy eyes them suspiciously, but the pain is excruciating. He takes the pills, and begins to lose consciousness. As he is taken away, he realizes that he has shoe polish on his thumbs.
For the remainder of the night, he has terrifying dreams that jumble together everyone he’s come across, filled with sexual fantasies and violence. He is unable to distinguish between Dolores and Rachel, and has violent fantasies of Dolores/Rachel murdering her children. He sees his own headstone, which reads Edward Daniels, Bad Sailor. A little girl asks why he couldn’t stop her in time.
He wakes up beside Dr. Cawley, who asks him about Dolores. Both share their stories of loss—Dr. Cawley mentions losing a lover in Paris who died during the war: she tripped, fell, and died of a concussion. He confronts Teddy about his suicidal thoughts, and suggests that if he keeps his current course, he will kill himself.
Teddy reconvenes with Chuck. He is embarrassed at having had such a debilitating attack in front of him. Chuck reveals that he had taken advantage of the confusion to look through Cawley’s files and calendar. He reveals that these four days are blocked off for “Patient 67.”
Teddy is unable to sleep, and dreams of the first time he met Dolores, before shipping out, at the Cocoanut Grove. He recalls Dolores as lonely, frightened, and out of place, and realizes that it was because of this that he connected with her. He wakes up and looks at the numbers in his notebook from the cemetery. When each number is translated to its equivalent letter and unscrambled, the resulting words are: Andrew Laeddis. He vows to kill Laeddis.
Analysis
While the first day of Shutter Island follows as a fairly straightforward procedural, the second day introduces elements that suggest that neither the place nor our protagonists are exactly what they seem. Lehane is able to gradually add more information to make both Cawley and Teddy more suspicious and less reliable, in a way that echoes the themes of uncertainty and insanity that the novel explores.
The most important information concerns Teddy. First, we learn that Teddy knows more than he is letting on. From his contact in the Senate, Teddy knows that something is wrong at Ashecliffe, and that many of the supposedly benign experiments have military applications, and are being carried out on relatively innocent people, like George Noyce. We also learn that Teddy volunteered to find the missing Rachel Solando because he knew that Andrew Laeddis, his wife’s murderer, was on the island, and that Ashecliffe is keeping his presence a secret—suggesting that he too is being experimented on.
But, as Teddy is the source of this information, he, too, becomes an unreliable narrator unreliable character from whose point of view to experience the story. In addition to his emotional wounds, which cloud his judgment when he interviews Rachel Solando, he suffers from acute migraines, which force him to take the hospital’s medication. The medication makes it extremely difficult for him to differentiate his waking life from his dream life. It is left to the reader to decide, for example, just how closely Dolores and Rachel Solando actually resemble one another.
Lehane makes use of this doubling throughout this section. Just as we receive more information making us more suspicious of him, Cawley himself appears kinder and more humane. In effect, there are two Cawleys—the cruel scientist imagined by Teddy, and the kindly character the reader encounters in the book. Cawley speaks up for the well-being of the patients in Ward C during the hurricane, and his manner is at odds with the rest of the hospital staff, who seem much more smug and cold. Cawley bonds with Teddy about his lost loves, and appears genuinely concerned for his well being. These scenes leave the reader unsure of what to feel about the character, especially as he remains unforthcoming with the hospital’s personnel files.
The same doubling occurs with Rachel and Dolores, and within Rachel herself, who is by turns sexually bold and innocent, sweet and violent, aggressive and passive.
In his essay “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud suggests that doubling creates a particular feeling of uneasiness in the reader that is different from mere fright. Freud suggests that the experience of a double is actually a memory of the narcissism we felt as children, which we had to overcome to become adults. The double is also a harbinger of death, as it suggests the loss of the unique self. That is why it is such a strange feeling, as opposed to the horror of gruesome violence, which is merely disgusting. From Teddy’s dreams, we know that there are memories he is repressing, that return to his conscious life against his well. These memories contribute to the sense of dread and paranoia on the island.
Lehane also roots this sense of paranoia in the historical present of his novel. The revelation that Ashecliffe might be funded by the House Un-American Activities Committee places the events of the novel against the background of McCarthyism—the political movement in the 1950s named for the Wisconsin senator who claimed to have a list of Communist agents who had infiltrated the government. Ashecliffe’s experiments with LSD and mescaline refer to the MKUltra experiments conducted by the CIA, in which the CIA dosed prisoners and often unsuspecting bystanders with LSD to test its effects as a truth serum. (The results were inconclusive.)
By the same token, the repeated mention of Nazi experimentation on Jews in concentration camps reminds the reader that many of those scientists later found work in America—under Operation Paper Clip, for example, in which Nazi scientists were given American citizenship in exchange for their expertise. Teddy recalls Dolores fretting about nuclear annihilation, while Dr. Cawley’s dubious medical credentials suggest that he engaged in some unsavory experimentation in Europe. In this way, Lehane makes it difficult to distinguish Teddy’s paranoia from the paranoia of his time, which seems to grip all of the characters.
