58 pages • 1 hour read
Dennis LehaneShutter Island
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaChapters 1-3 (Day 1: Rachel)Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
The plot of Shutter Island unfolds over the course of four days in September 1954, and Lehane separates the chapters of his novel into sections labeled for each day. The first chapter kicks off the “Day 1” section of the novel and introduces readers to Edward “Teddy” Daniels, a U.S. Marshal who has been called out to investigate the disappearance Rachel Solando, of one of Ashecliffe’s resident patients. Teddy is a highly-decorated World War II veteran who has worked as a U.S. Marshal since the war. Despite his successful career, however, Teddy’s personal life is marked by tragedy. His experiences on the front lines of World War II continue to haunt him, but not as much as the death of his wife, Dolores, who died in a tragic fire two years prior.
Unfortunately for Teddy, the only way to get to Shutter Island is by ferry. Teddy has “never enjoyed being out on the water,” and this trip makes him seasick (11). Teddy’s tense ferry ride to Ashecliffe is softened by his interactions with his new partner and fellow U.S. Marshal, Chuck Aule. Teddy learns that Chuck also served in World War II and has recently transferred to Teddy’s branch because of tensions brewing back in Seattle. Chuck explains that his fiancée is Japanese-American, and while the war might be over, anti-Japanese sentiment continues to run deep.
The conversation shifts to the weather—a strong storm is expected to hit Shutter Island the next day—before turning to Ashecliffe. Teddy tells Chuck that the hospital is for the “criminally insane,” which means the patients suffer from serious, dangerous delusions (22). As far as he can tell, Teddy believes all the patients are “’you know, really crazy’” (23).
Chapter 2 Summary
The ferry docks on Shutter Island, and the Marshals are met by the warden of the hospital. Deputy Warden McPherson and a host of orderlies greet the men before giving them a tour of the hospital compound. The island is split into sections: the patient wards, the staff quarters, the warden’s house, and the lighthouse (which McPherson explains is used for sewage treatment). The hospital itself has three wards that are surrounded by a containment wall topped with electrical wire. McPherson points each one out and explains that Ward A is the women’s ward, Ward B is for men, and Ward C is for the hospital’s most unstable residents. Teddy cannot help but pity the patients, who must realize “how badly the world wanted to keep them in” (27).
As McPherson shows Teddy and Chuck the island, he explains that Ashecliffe is unique because it takes “only the most damaged patients…no other facility can manage” (34). To underscore the hospital’s mission, the three men discuss Vincent Gryce, one of Ashecliffe’s patients who was moved to the facility after he killed his relatives, made their scalps into hats, and then wore them into town. Gryce is just one of the many patients at Ashecliffe, all of whom have their own horrible histories.
McPherson tells the marshals that because of the nature of Ashecliffe’s work, it is critical that Chuck and Teddy adhere to the hospital’s protocols. He explains that there will be no unmonitored contact between Chuck, Teddy, and the hospital’s residents at any time. Additionally, the marshals cannot carry their service guns while on the property. Teddy and Chuck protest but ultimately turn their guns over to McPherson, who assures them they will get the guns back when they leave. With the issue settled, McPherson takes Chuck and Teddy to meet Dr. John Cawley, Ashecliffe’s chief of staff.
Chapter 3 Summary
McPherson escorts Chuck and Teddy to Cawley’s office, where the two find the doctor waiting for them. The doctor is so thin that he reminds Teddy of the prisoners at Dachau, a Nazi concentration camp Teddy helped liberate at the end of the war. While Cawley might look slickly, his reputation is legendary: he graduated from John Hopkins and Harvard, published his first paper when he was twenty, and has served as a consultant for Scotland Yard, MI5, and the Office of Strategic Services.
Cawley explains that Rachel Solando, the missing patient, is at Ashecliffe Hospital because she drowned her three children in the lake behind her house. Rachel believes her children are still alive, and her delusions are so strong that she has never acknowledged that she lives in an institution. Instead, she thinks she is at home in the Berkshires and that the staff are “‘deliverymen, milkmen, [and] postal workers just passing by’” (51).
Cawley tells Teddy and Chuck that Rachel disappeared between nine o’clock and eleven o’clock the prior evening. Her room was locked from the inside when Mr. Ganton, one of the hospital’s orderlies, found her missing. The staff immediately conducted a search of the island but to no avail, which is why they contacted the U.S. Marshals for help.
Teddy and Chuck question Ganton, who was the last person to see Rachel before her disappearance. He explains that he escorted her back to her room after a group therapy session and locked her in for the evening. Teddy initially thinks she might have slipped out before Ganton could shut the door behind him, but one look at her tiny room proves that to be impossible. As Cawley says, it appears as if Rachel “‘evaporated straight through the walls’” (42). The lack of evidence leads Teddy to suspect that one of the hospital’s staff members helped Rachel escape, but Cawley balks when Teddy requests to view their personnel files, which piques Teddy’s suspicion.
By the end of their interviews and the inspection of Rachel’s room, the only clue Teddy and Chuck have to go on is one Rachel wrote herself. Cawley shows the marshals a puzzle Rachel scrawled on the back of a hospital eye chart:
THE LAW OF 4
I AM 47
THEY WERE 80
+YOU ARE 3
WE ARE 4
BUT
WHO IS 67? (50)
Teddy and Chuck do not immediately understand the clue, so they file the paper away before moving to inspect the rest of the ward.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Psychological thrillers borrow heavily from other genres, and Shutter Island is no different. The first three chapters of the book pull elements from hard-boiled detective fiction, a darker sub-genre that dates back to the 1920s and plays on long odds, grittiness, and violence. One of the key attributes of hard-boiled detective fiction is the detective himself, who is a tough, cynical, self-destructive investigator whose violent nature bubbles just below the surface.
Teddy Daniels certainly fits this bill. He is instinctively distrustful and not cowed by authority, so even when Cawley had “shown displeasure” with his intense questioning, he keeps pursuing the truth (49). Teddy pushes hard for answers, which readers see when he tells Cawley that asking for Asheville’s personnel files “‘wasn’t a request’” (48). He even threatens the doctor with obstruction of justice when Cawley continues to balk. But despite his tough exterior, Teddy remains haunted by three pivotal moments in his life: the death of his father on a fishing boat lost at sea, his own participation in World War II, and the untimely death of his wife. Although Teddy insists that he has “‘learned to carry something like that…you got no choice,’” Lehane shows readers that Teddy is struggling under the weight of his own trauma (21).
Lehane also reimagines hard-boiled detective fiction’s other trademark character, the femme fatale, in the character of Rachel Solando. The femme fatale is a beautiful woman who preys on the hard-boiled detective’s heart in order to lure him into danger. When Teddy first sees Solando’s picture, he is immediately taken by her beauty. He sees sadness and trauma in her eyes, and he finds himself wanting to “hold her until the shakes stopped, [and] tell her everything would be all right” (44). Although Teddy is a seasoned investigator, he cannot keep Rachel from penetrating his emotional defenses. In this moment, readers question whether Teddy is prepared to handle the Solando case even as Teddy’s spark of compassion gives readers hope that he might overcome his own demons.
Additionally, Lehane is particularly interested in how femme fatales challenge the traditional roles of women. Whereas “good” women were domestic, loving, and delicate, the femme fatale directly attacks the structures of traditional womanhood and femininity. Outwardly, Rachel looks every bit the beauty, but she still manages to do the unthinkable: she murders her own children. She upends one of the foundational principles of traditional womanhood—the idea that women are intrinsically wired to take care of their children—and leaves horror in her wake. But her high-level delusions make it clear that Rachel does not understand what she has done. Rachel is clearly mentally ill, which makes readers question whether her actions are unforgivably evil, unfathomably tragic, or something in between.
By including elements of hard-boiled detective fiction in Shutter Island, Lehane does two things. First, he sets the stage for the initial mystery of the novel; after all, Chuck and Teddy are conducting a missing persons investigation. Second, Lehane uses tropes from hard-boiled detective fiction to give readers a touchstone for understanding two of the novel’s central characters. Readers think they understand Teddy and Rachel because they have met characters like them before in other detective stories, so they make assumptions about how plot Shutter Island will unfold. When Teddy and Rachel start to change in unexpected ways, readers are caught off guard. By playing his characters against type, Lehane is able to build suspense and shock his readers, which is the foundation of a psychological thriller.
Related Titles
By Dennis Lehane
