Summary
Prologue
The novel opens with a journal entry by Dr. Lester Sheehan, dated May 3, 1993. Sheehan expresses the desire to set down his memories about his time as a doctor at Ashecliffe Hospital on Shutter Island now that he is close to death, and his memory is going. He compares memories to bookmarks in a book, and he fears that they’re fluttering away.
Sheehan recalls Ashecliffe as a hospital for the criminally insane. The hospital is beautifully built, and has a long history dating back to the Civil War. He attempts to picture it as it would have looked to Teddy Daniels in 1954, a small island of no significance. That was a significant year, and he wants to tell it as it was, since Teddy hated lies.
Sheehan also recalls that the island was covered with rats, and that there was a small island, called Paddock Island just off the coast, that was above water for two hours each day. The rats would often drown trying to swim for it. One time, however, he saw a rat make it to Paddock Island. He reflects on Andrew Laeddis, Teddy Daniels, Dolores Chanal, Rachel Solando. He believes that if Teddy had seen that rat, he would have clapped.
Day One: Rachel
The novel now switches to the perspective of Teddy Daniels, a U.S. Marshal. Teddy is arriving by ferry to Shutter Island with his partner, Chuck Aule, in 1954. Teddy’s seasickness reminds him of his father, an unsuccessful fisherman who was unable to keep up the payments on his boat, and was later killed in a storm. Teddy recalls being on the boat with his father as a boy. He was not much help, since he was too overcome by the dizzying sight of the expanse of water. Teddy recalls seeing the shame in his father’s eyes at his son being a “bad sailor.”
Now, as an adult, Teddy is seasick again. As he cleans himself in the boat’s toilet, he notices his tie, a loud floral tie that was a present from his wife. She died recently, and he fears he is forgetting her. He and Chuck chat, during which time he notices that Chuck’s hands are unusually delicate for a Marshal. Both are veterans of the war, and Chuck defers to Teddy as the senior and superior officer. Teddy is well-known among the Marshals for his psychological astuteness; he has recently cracked a high profile case. Chuck’s standing in the Marshals is poor because his girlfriend is Japanese, and spent time in an internment camp during the war.
Chuck offers Teddy both a drink and a smoke. Teddy has forgotten his cigarettes, and accepts one from Chuck, but refuses the drink. He no longer drinks after his wife’s death. They share memories of the war, and observe that a hurricane is coming on. Teddy explains that his wife died in a fire in their apartment building two years ago. Teddy feels unwell on the water, and feels a migraine coming on as well.
On shore, Teddy fills Chuck in on their assignment. Ashecliffe is a hospital for the criminally insane, especially schizophrenics, that specializes in radical psychiatric approaches. They’ve come to investigate the disappearance of one of the patients. They meet Deputy Warden McPherson, who admits that the island is completely unprepared for the storm to come. Chuck observes correctional guards on the island, an oddity for a mental hospital. McPherson explains that it is a maximum security institution. They pass the warden, who acknowledges them only in passing.
Both Teddy and Chuck are asked to surrender their firearms before entering the island. Teddy notices a lighthouse that is under heavy guard. McPherson explains that it is a sewage treatment plant. They also chat about Dr. Cawley, who has some classified military background as a psychiatrist.
McPherson leads them into the office of Dr. Cawley. Cawley explains Ashecliffe’s mission as a psychiatric hospital that specializes in humanitarian approaches both to correction and psychiatry, looking for alternatives to the harsh usual treatments like shock therapy and lobotomies. He tells them about a patient named Rachel Solando, who has escaped. She is a war widow who killed her children and proceeded to eat a last meal with them seated at the table when she was discovered by a neighbor.
Her escape is hard to explain, since Shutter Island is eleven miles away from land. The grounds have been searched, there is no sign that her room has been tampered with. Teddy’s migraine gets worse, and Dr. Cawley obligingly offers him two aspirin. The marshals examine a photo of Solando, who is strikingly beautiful.
The orderly on duty takes them to Solando's room. The room is small enough to preclude the possibility of her having hidden in it. Both pairs of shoes are still present, indicating that Solando would have left on the rocky island barefoot. Teddy notes to himself that despite the hospital’s humanitarian approach, the room is obviously a cell. Teddy asks for access to the personnel files, but Cawley demurs. Cawley also gives Teddy a piece of paper Solando left behind which reads: “The Law of 4, I am 47, + You are 3, We are 4, but who is 67?”
Considering the heightened security and the orderlies on duty, Teddy and Chuck surmise that she must have had help from someone working at Ashecliffe. The only person not accounted for is Dr. Sheehan, but Dr. Cawley refuses to turn over his file. They surmise that Sheehan fell in love with Solando and helped her escape, and that Teddy and Chuck have been called in to sweep the occurrence under the rug.
Reporting back to Dr. Cawley after searching the island, they meet his colleague, Dr. Naehring, who clinically observes Teddy, and calls him a “man of violence.” Naehring reminds Teddy of a commandant he watched commit suicide when he liberated Dachau.
The rain starts, and Teddy and Chuck are shown to the orderlies’ quarters, where they play poker. Chuck wins handily. He has an easy way with the orderlies, and a knack for reading people’s tells. Teddy dreams about Dolores, who tells him that “Laeddis” is here. Teddy wakes up and tells Chuck that he has broken Rachel’s code.
Analysis
The first chapter of Shutter Island introduces both the protagonist and the reader to Ashecliffe. As a US Marshal, and a visitor to the unsettling island, Teddy’s powers of observation are heightened; his training as a soldier and a marshal cause him to observe things and make connections. In this way, he is an ideal narrator for a mystery, cut from the same cloth as figures like Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe, the hard-boiled protagonists of the 40s and 50s detective novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Through Teddy, the reader is able to get a sense of the surroundings and a quick assessment of the characters. We also quickly learn the parameters of the mystery. Despite Ashecliffe’s humanitarianism, something secretive and military is clearly afoot there, and despite the fact that Rachel Solando is missing, the facts of the case indicate that someone must have helped her escape. Teddy hasn’t connected the two yet, but solving the two problems at once will clearly be necessary.
Unlike Spade and Marlowe, jaded detectives who never lose their cool, Teddy struggles with the masculine ideal of the hard-boiled detective. His memories of his father immediately establish Teddy’s inability to match his father’s bravery in the face of the ocean’s expanse. The death of Dolores, his wife, has clearly scarred Teddy very deeply. He wears a feminine, floral tie in memory of her, while his inability to drink and his migraines mark him as unmanly in a hard-drinking profession. Chuck, too, is described as feminine, and his wit and refusal to insist on his authority make him an unlikely U.S. Marshal.
Both men are also haunted by the memory of the war, which they remember not as a time of heroism, as many Americans did and do, but as a time of shocking brutality and social collapse. Teddy still agonizes over having had to kill in the war; the fact that his victims were concentration camp guards brings him little peace. He doesn’t feel that his intuitive feel for violence, which has brought him a distinguished career as a marshal, is something to be proud of. Here, as later in the book, Teddy has numerous flashbacks to the liberation of Dachau. Like the ocean, the sight of so much human misery strikes Teddy as too much to bear or comprehend. In Dr. Naehring’s condescending examination of Teddy, Teddy states that the camps prove to him once and for all that God does not exist. Chuck’s personal history alludes to other, distinctly unheroic aspects of World War II, like America’s internment of Japanese-American citizens.
The first chapter also places the psychiatric history of the hospital in historical context. In the 1940s and 50s, psychiatric care largely consisted of confinement, and, in the cases of violent patients, electric shocks and lobotomies. Dr. Cawley predicts (correctly) that the future of psychiatric treatment will be pharmacological, a kind of lobotomy without surgery. This close historical contextualization of psychiatry dovetails with his broader reflections on madness, which he characterizes as the capacity to create complex fantasies in order to avoid horrible truths, fantasies so involved and so detailed that it becomes impossible to distinguish them from reality itself. These reflections, together with the Gothic setting of the novel, immediately signal to the reader that we are not simply in a detective story, but entering the realm of psychological horror.
