SHUTTER ISLAND

Biography of Dennis Lehane

Dennis Lehane was in Boston, Massachusetts. He grew up in the suburb of
Dorchester, where many of his novels are set. His father, an immigrant from
Ireland, was a foreman for Sears & Roebuck, while his mother, also from
Ireland, worked for a public school. Lehane attended Eckerd College, where
he began to write. In 1994, he published his first novel, A Drink Before the
War, which introduced Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, private
investigators in a relationship who recur in Lehane's novels.

Over the next years, Lehane followed that novel with several more following
the characters, including Darkness, Take My Hand, Gone, Baby, Gone, and
Praying for Rain, in the late nineties. During that time, he also wrote Mystic
River, which brought him to a large national audience because of the 2003
film adaptation by Clint Eastwood, starring Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon.
Gone, Baby, Gone was filmed in 2007, and resulted in an Oscar nomination
for Casey Affleck, who played Patrick Mackenzie. Shutter Island, which was
written in 2003, was turned into a film by Martin Scorsese in 2010, starring
Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo. The three films cemented Lehane's
reputation as one of the best nationally known crime writers. He has also
written for The Wire, together with Richard Price and George Pelaconos,
crime writers of equal stature.

About shutter island

Shutter Island is a thriller written in 2003 by Dennis Lehane. Set in the
summer of 1954, with memories of World War Two still fresh, the novel
follows U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels as he travels to Shutter Island, the
location of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Assigned a new
partner, Chuck Aule, Teddy is ostensibly investigating the disappearance of a
patient, but is also investigating rumors of Ashecliffe's use of controversial
radical treatments. The book has an intriguing and exceptionally intricate
plot and the reader is confronted by two equally plausible conclusions at the
end.

Shutter Island deals in depth with different psychiatric conditions and

disorders, including pure psychopathy, delusions and bipolar disorder. In
order to write the novel, Lehane researched psychiatry and mental illness in
depth and credits three books in particular for his research: Mad In America
by Robert Whittaker, Gracefully Insane by Alex Beam, and Boston Harbor
Islands by Emily and David Kale.

Unlike Lehane's other works—which take place in the Boston area and deal
with many of the social issues facing the poor white residents of Southie and
Dorchester, like child abuse, gentrification, and drugs—Shutter Island takes
place off the coast of Boston, and in the past. Nonetheless, throughout the
novel, Lehane draws on Boston's history, including its past in the
Revolutionary and Civil Wars, as well as the military's use of islands off the
coast of Massachusetts as target practice for shelling in the Pacific Theater.
Boston's tense racial history, too, is also reflected in the island's staff.

The book was national bestseller, and, after the success of the 2003 film
adaptation of Lehane's Mystic River, led to even greater national exposure
for the author. Lehane wrote several episodes for the HBO series "The Wire"
soon after, and in 2010, Shutter Island was turned into a film by Martin
Scorsese, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo.

Shutter Island Summary

The book is set in 1954 and revolves around the life of U.S Marshall Teddy
Daniels, as well as his partner, Chuck, as they travel to Shutter Island, a
home for the criminally insane. One of the criminals imprisoned on the
island, Rachel Solando, has gone missing, and they are attempting to find
her.

As they are investigating, Teddy comes to suspect that there is one more
person on the island who is not meant to be present. They also discover that
psychotropic drugs are being tested on the criminals. Teddy is desperate to
find the missing criminal, and speaks to an inmate who tells him that he
should not trust Chuck.

Teddy then learns of a woman claiming to be Rachel Solando who is hiding

out in one of the caves. She reveals that his food and drugs have been
spiked with the psychotropic drugs. He then tries to find Chuck, who is
missing. He then heads off to the lighthouse, where he believes the
experiments are being conducted on the criminals.

He then finds Dr. Cawley, who tells Teddy that he is in fact Andrew Laeddis,
and that he has killed his wife, Dolores Chanal (an anagram of Rachel
Solando), after she killed their children. Chuck arrives and it is shown that
Chuck is actually Dr. Sheehan, his psychiatrist. Sheehan claims that he and
Dr. Cawley have given Andrew/Teddy the drugs to help him live his fantasy
out in his mind and ultimately confront the truth about how he killed his wife.
If he doesn't accept the truth, the doctors will force him to undergo a radical
lobotomy.

The ending remains ambiguous as to which is the true version of events. Is

Teddy really Andrew, and if so, is this the truth about his past, or merely
another fantasy?

Characters
Trey Washington

Trey Washington is an African-American orderly whom Teddy and Chuck

encounter at the start of the novel. Later, he tells Teddy that there is a ferry
leaving the island the next and that he must be on it, after Teddy taunts him
for taking orders from the racist warden. Like Teddy, Trey is a war veteran.

Dr. Rachel Solando

Dr. Rachel Solando is a woman in patients' scrubs whom Teddy encounters in

a cave on Shutter Island. She claims to be a doctor who worked at Ashecliffe,
until she discovered the barbaric experiments that were going on there. She
threatened to expose the island, and was labeled insane and confined there.
She warns Teddy against eating any food, smoking any cigarettes, or drinking
any water on the island, as they may be dosed with neuroleptics.

Litchfield

Litchfield is an escaped patient on Ward C, who runs around tagging people

"it." When Teddy and Chuck encounter him, he tells them about the invention
of a new weapon called the hydrogen bomb, which implodes rather than
explodes. Teddy later encounters a guard who is looking for him, and directs
him to the place where Teddy and Litchfield spoke.

Glossary
Dachau

One of the more infamous German concentration camps of World War Two,
liberated by American soldiers in 1945

Flounder

An edible flat fish

Fusion

The act of blending different things together to create a new one

Grimace

A distortion of the face made in disgust

Hallucinate

The act of seeing things that are not actually there

Human Guinea Pig

A person subjected to experimental or other observational procedures

LSD

Hallucinogenic drug commonly known as acid and popularized as a

recreational drug in the late 1960s

Manacled

Shackled or restrained by the hands

Mansard

A style of roof with four sloping sides that become steeper halfway down

Mescaline

A hallucinogenic alkaloid present in the peyote cactus

Moccasin

A poisonous North American water snake

Milling

Moving around in a directionless way, usually in a crowd

Penal

Concerning severe punishment and its infliction

Portico

A colonnade or roof supported by pillars

Promontory

An outcrop of land jutting into the sea

Protocol

Observed etiquette or the correct and traditional way of doing things

Psychotherapist

A person who treats mental disorders by psychological analysis

Lobotomy

A medical procedure intended to render violent or untreatable patients docile

by removing part of their brain.

Phencyclidine
Commonly known as "angel dust," phencyclidine is a smokable drug that
causes heavy hallucinations.

Bosun

Short for "boatswain"; the person on a ship in charge of managing the

equipment, as well as the crew.

Themes
Mental Illness

The central theme of the novel is mental illness, specifically illness that
involves psychopathy and the criminally insane. Each of the characters is
either a psychiatrist or a patient, but even the doctors seem to suffer from
some kind of psychological disorder, such as Dr. Cawley, whose belief in his
theory that all people are violent at their core borders on obsessive. Teddy,
the main character, is said to be delusional, and the patients have varying
degrees of psychopathy—for example, Vincent Gryce, who scalped this
family and wore the tops of their heads as hats. There is also an assertion in
the book that a person can be driven insane given the right combination of
drugs and circumstances.

Conspiracy Theories

Another theme that is revisited many times throughout the novel is

conspiracy theories. George Noyes, a prisoner, had talked about illicit
experiments and abusive treatment of patients at Shutter Island, and Teddy
bought into these. It is apparent that it would be very easy for the authorities
to cover up any illicit activity by claiming the accuser was delusional or
paranoid. The novel takes place in a time of acute paranoia: worry about a
Japanese “Fifth Column” within the United States, about Communist
infiltrators, Nazi scientists working under assumed identities in the United
States, and CIA experimentation. By filling his novel with conspiracy theories
that did, in fact, turn out to be true (the latter two, specifically), Lehane
intensifies the suspicious atmosphere on Shutter Island.

Grief

Many of the characters in Shutter Island suffer from grief over lost loved
ones. Teddy, most obviously, suffers from the memory of his wife Dolores,
while Chuck suffers angrily from the memory of his girlfriend’s internment.
Dr. Cawley mentions the loss of a lover in Paris, who, amid all of the carnage
during the war, simply tripped and fell and died. Rachel Solando has been
driven mad by the grief of her husband’s death, and grief for the loss of her
children whom she killed. If we read the ending of the novel to mean that
Teddy is, in fact, Andrew Laeddis, then the novel is no longer a mystery but a
meditation on grief, and the question of whether it is possible to let go of
painful memories, or to forgive oneself for wrong-doing. Teddy’s decision to
have himself lobotomized suggests that, for him at least, it is impossible—
particularly in a world as harsh as the one he has experienced.

Masculinity

The novel opens with Teddy’s reflection on being a “bad sailor”—the fact
that, unlike his father, he can’t handle the wide open sea. He is unsuited to
the harshness and unfathomability of the ocean, and, more broadly, of the
world. Throughout the novel, Teddy is presented as falling short of several
masculine ideals: he wears a feminine, floral-print tie, he doesn’t drink, he
suffers from seasickness. Teddy is unable to maintain the rugged, masculine
ideal of the detective: hard-boiled emotionlessness. Every act of violence—
and having to suppress his emotion at an act of violence, as a man is
expected to do—causes Teddy significant pain. Other male characters, too,
like Chuck/Dr. Sheehan and Dr. Cawley, consider themselves out of place
because of their depth of feeling, which damages their career in hyper-
masculine professions like the U.S. Marshals and psychiatry.

Violence

violence," while the warden openly observes that society is a thin veneer for
the openly violent character of man and nature. The violence that haunts
Teddy most is the violence of the war, which most Americans remember
heroically. He draws no satisfaction and no moral closure from the murder of
the guards at Dachau, for example, and he still feels guilt and anguish at
having made intelligence mistakes that led to the deaths of his platoon, or
simply from seeing friends be killed. Those memories have made Teddy a
skilled marshal, adept at thinking his way into the minds of violent criminals,
but that has taken an enormous personal toll on him. If we read the novel to
mean that Teddy has been lobotomized at the end, then this violence is
undoubtedly the part of his mind that Teddy wants removed.

Truth and Power

On the novel's third day, Teddy's encounter with Dr. Rachel Solando
introduces the idea that that institutional power dictates truth. Because the
psychiatrists at Shutter Island are in the position of determining who is sane
and who is not, they essentially have control over reality, by declaring those
who disagree with them, or seek to criticize them, as insane. Lehane
repeatedly draws parallels between the medical realities of the psychiatric
profession and the profession's political abuses, as for example by Senator
Joseph McCarthy, who accused his political opponents of being Communists.
Teddy's struggle to establish what is really going on at Ashecliffe ultimately
fails, and the reader is left without the sense that there is a firm truth beyond
the reach of Ashecliffe's doctors.

Nature

Shutter Island is filled with vivid natural imagery, like the terror of the storm,
the overwhelming ocean, the jagged cliffs, the portentous sky before the
rain. The natural world in Shutter Island is one that is hostile to human
beings, not simply because of its violence, but because if its unfathomable
enormousness. Teddy's first memory is of vomiting after seeing the ocean's
enormity, and the many overwhelming natural occurrences on the island
drive home the sense that the natural world is one that is fundamentally
inhospitable to human beings and that ultimately exceeds our
comprehension. The warden surmises that nature is simply violence, and
that all attempts to establish a more civilized society are doomed to fail,
because, as natural beings, humans' violent tendencies cannot be
suppressed.

Shutter Island Essay Questions

1)At the end of the novel, are you convinced that Teddy is really Andrew
Laeddis, or do you believe he has been brainwashed into believing this by Dr.
Cawley?

Ans) Both scenarios are plausible. The author has done such a skillful job of
portraying Teddy as a US Marshal investigating a suspicious mental hospital
that it is difficult to believe Dr. Cawley's assertions that he is Andrew Laeddis.
For example, the content of his dreams could have been shouted out in his
sleep, or confided to "Chuck," allowing Dr. Cawley to use these details to
construct a plausible narrative. At the same time, the glimpses that the
reader gets into the life at the hospital Shutter Island suggest that Dr. Cawley
is in fact on the outs with the other doctors, and he consistently shows more
sympathy to the patients than do the other doctors. Fundamentally, each
ending suggests a different novel, and it is up to the reader to decide which
he or she has just read: a novel about a vain struggle against institutional
forces, or a novel about overwhelming grief.
2)Teddy states several times that the patients on Shutter Island remind him
of the prisoners he liberated from Dachau. What other similarities does he
draw between Shutter Island and the Nazi death camps?

Ans) Teddy hints that he believes Dr. Naehring was a Nazi who has come to
America to continue his experiments into mental disorders and psychopathy.
Many of the experiments with the effects of various drugs were begun in the
death camps, and also various lobotomy experiments were undertaken there
as well. The camps also changed Teddy forever as he was haunted by what
he saw and the experience unnerved him. At the same time, participating in
the execution of Nazi criminals permanently changed Teddy's sense of
justice, making him suspicious of any violence done for a cause.

3) How does the hurricane affect the plot of the novel?

Ans) The hurricane shorts the electrical circuits on the island, disabling all of
the locks and electrical fences. This enables Teddy and Chuck to roam the
island without being detected, and also leads to the confrontation between
Teddy and Noyes. Without the changes in terrain, the men would have been
far more confined and the search that Teddy begins of the island would have
been impossible. The hurricane also adds psychological coloring that
underlines the theme of reality being formed by the mind. The rain picks up
in intensity as the action does; it rages just when Teddy is laying out his
suspicions to Chuck; it hits a tense lull during the moment when Teddy is
trying to get on the ferry.

4)Assume that Dr. Cawley and Dr. Sheehan are telling Teddy the truth. How
does it change our perception of the events of the novel to know that
everything up until that point has been staged? Why do you think Lehane
bothered telling you this story?

Ans) If we believe Dr. Cawley—that everything Teddy has experienced so far

is a role-playing reality set up to have him reach the realization that he killed
his wife—then the novel becomes less about institutional abuse and more a
reflection of grief. Rather than adding suspense about whether Teddy will
expose the doctors at Ashecliffe, the reader is reading to see if Teddy will
ever come to grips with what happened with his wife, and achieve a measure
of peace. Since he does not, we can read the story less as a mystery and
more of a tragedy. Stylistically, instead of describing schizophrenia, the
novel's twist effectively tries to simulate its feeling in the reader.
5) Dr. Cawley and Dr. Sheehan claim to be humanitarians. But the novel is
filled with brutality. Where does the novel find glimmers of humanity? What
do these moments tell us about the novel's worldview?

Ans) Despite the novel's heavy emphasis on madness, imprisonment, and

violence, Lehane carefully preserves several moments of humanity. Teddy's
love for Dolores, and the feeling of mutual shelter they gave one another
from the violence and cruelty of the world is one such moment—though it is
turned tragic by Dolores's killing of their children. Chuck's ease and
friendliness with the orderlies, and his loyalty to Teddy, is another such
moment, together with the recollections of camaraderie during the war.
Finally, Cawley's humanitarianism, and his compassion for the patients on
Shutter Island, is another such moment. Altogether they show that though
the forces of brutality and inhumanity might not be defeated, humanity
survives in small gestures and moments.