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.
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BetaChapters 10-13 (Day 2: Laeddis)Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary
McPherson is angry with the marshals for venturing outside during the storm, which has officially been upgraded to a hurricane. Teddy and Chuck are soaking wet, so they change into orderly scrubs before meeting with Dr. Cawley. McPherson escorts the marshals to Cawley’s office, and the two inadvertently walk in on a tense meeting between Ashecliffe’s doctors. They are debating whether to continue on with testing psychotropic drugs on their worst patients; Cawley objects, citing studies that suggest the drugs could do long-term damage, but he is overruled by vote.
The talk then turns to the hurricane and fears that it could knock out power to the island. The doctors are particularly concerned about Ward C. Should the power go out and the back-up generator fail, the cell doors will open automatically and release the hospital’s most dangerous patients. Dr. Naehring argues that the patients should be tied to their beds for safety, but Cawley pushes back. If the island floods, he argues, “‘they’ll all die’” (162).
Over the course of the debate, Teddy realizes that the island currently holds sixty-six patients. He interrupts the doctors and explains he thinks the “67” in Rachel Solando’s first coded message refers to the island’s sixty-seventh patient. Cawley insists that there are only sixty-six patients on the island including Rachel, who has returned to the hospital unharmed while Teddy and Chuck were searching the graveyard.
Chapter 11 Summary
Cawley and Naehring lead the marshals to Rachel’s room, where they find her sitting on her bed. She thinks Teddy and Chuck are door-to-door salesmen, and Cawley explains that they are policemen. Teddy explains that they need to know her whereabouts the day before because they are looking for a communist subversive she may have crossed paths with. Rachel insists she is not a communist, and Teddy reassures her that he knows she is as “‘American as Betty Grable,’” which puts her fears at ease (168).
Rachel then explains that she made breakfast for her children and packed her husband’s lunch before taking a swim in the lake. When Teddy asks her what happened afterward, Rachel’s delusion suddenly intensifies. She mistakes Teddy for her husband, Jim, and moves close enough that Teddy has to hold her face to keep her from kissing him. At this point, Teddy is struggling with his own attraction to Rachel, who reminds him of Dolores. Rachel tells Teddy that she came back wet “‘from the lake and you licked me dry,’” but when Teddy asks about what happened next, Rachel’s seduction turns into fear. She realizes that Jim is dead and physically lashes out at Teddy. She accuses Teddy of trying to rape her as orderlies tie her to her bed, and her screaming follows Teddy even after he leaves the room.
Teddy, Chuck, and Cawley retreat to Cawley’s office, but Teddy’s encounter with Rachel has triggered one of his migraine headaches. Teddy’s migraines are so severe that they incapacitate him, and Cawley offers Teddy medicine that he promises will help. A voice inside Teddy cautions him against taking the pills, but Teddy ignores his better judgement. He takes the pills the doctor offers and lays down in Cawley’s back room to rest.
Chapter 12 Summary
This chapter opens with Teddy trapped in a nightmare. He finds himself in an empty town with three terrified children and Andrew Laeddis, who invites him for a drink. Laeddis walks off and Rachel appears, carrying a cleaver. She attacks and kills the three children—two boys, one girl—but Teddy just watches, realizing “there was nothing he could do…those kids were dead” (182).
Rachel then turns to Teddy and offers to pretend to be Dolores. He agrees and helps Rachel take the children’s bodies to a lake, where they lay them in the water and watch them sink. As they walk away from the lake, they run into Chuck and Cawley. Chuck explains that while Teddy can leave, he belongs on the island now. Cawley, on the other hand, confronts Teddy about how he could possibly love a woman who murdered her children. Teddy responds, “‘I can…you just don’t understand’” (184). Cawley then morphs into Peter Breene, the patient Teddy interviewed earlier in the day, and Teddy shoots Breene in the head.
Teddy hears a child’s shriek and realizes that the little girl Rachel had killed earlier is alive. The girl calls Teddy “Daddy” and asks him for help, and he reluctantly agrees (185). He and the girl go to the mausoleum, and Teddy makes her a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. But the peace is short lived—Rachel returns and tells Teddy that the children are hers. Teddy tells Rachel how much he loves her as he hands the little girl over, and the last thing Teddy sees is the little girl’s hopeless eyes as Rachel carries her away.
Teddy wakes up in tears only to find Cawley sitting by his bed. Cawley asks about Dolores—Teddy was calling her name out in his sleep—and Teddy explains that Dolores is his dead wife. He and the doctor talk about their lost loves; Cawley lost a partner during the war as well. Cawley explains that he specializes in “‘grief trauma and survivor’s guilt’” because of his own loss and asks Teddy if he is suicidal (192). Teddy denies it, but Cawley is unconvinced and offers Teddy the names of doctors who can help.
Chapter 13 Summary
Teddy has recovered from his migraine, so he goes to find Chuck. Chuck is glad to see Teddy is better and confesses that he used Teddy’s headache as cover to search through Cawley’s desk. There he finds Cawley’s calendar, which has four days blocked off. The dates correspond to the days the marshals planned to stay on the island. These dates are labeled with one phrase: “Patient sixty-seven” (199).
That night, Teddy finds himself unable to sleep. The hurricane is at its climax, and he cannot stop wondering whether he is suicidal, as Cawley suggests. He decides he is since “he couldn’t remember a day since Dolores’s death when he hadn’t thought of joining her” (199). Thinking about Dolores reminds him of the first time they met at the Cocoanut Grove. Teddy was drawn to Dolores the minute he saw her, and he pushed his way through the dance floor to ask if he could buy her a drink. They were both nervous, and by the time Teddy escorted Dolores home, he knew he was in love.
Teddy’s trip down memory lane does nothing for his sleep, so he decides to work on the rock code he and Chuck discovered on their way to the cemetery earlier that day. He works by match light and assigns each pile its corresponding letter, just like in Rachel’s first code. The result looks like this:
18–1–4–9–5–4–19–1–12–4–23–14–5
R–A–D–I–E–D–S–A–L–D–W–N–E
When Teddy finally unscrambles the letters, he realizes that Rachel’s code spells out Andrew Laeddis’ name. As the storm continues to howl outside, Teddy makes a decision: he is going to find Laeddis and kill him.
Chapters 10-13 Analysis
The hurricane has reached its crescendo in this section of Shutter Island. The external turmoil of the weather serves as an outward manifestation of two other tumultuous situations: Teddy’s inner anguish over Dolores’ death and the struggle for the future of mental health treatment.
Teddy is deeply traumatized by the loss of Dolores, and he struggles to cope with the reality of her death. Teddy fears that moving on means putting “Dolores on a shelf” in hopes that “enough dust would accumulate to soften his memory of her…[u]ntil one day she’d be less of a person who had lived and more of the dream of one” (200). So, instead, Teddy clings to Dolores in an act of both loyalty and self-destructive penance; he forces himself to feel the pain of her loss again and again as punishment for how he treated Dolores right before her death.
Although Teddy tries to downplay his grief throughout the novel, the trauma of his loss is always bubbling under the surface. Lehane makes this clear during Teddy’s interview with Rachel, who is able to pull him into her delusion because she reminds him of Dolores. Teddy cannot help noticing Rachel’s “lips and hair were both similar, enough so that if Rachel’s face got much closer, he could be forgiven for thinking he was talking to Dolores” (172). The exchange triggers both a physical and psychological reaction in Teddy. He comes down with a migraine and then has a nightmare where Rachel tells him “‘I’ll be Dolores. I’ll be your wife’” (182). This moment does more than just illuminate Teddy’s unresolved trauma: in blurring the line between Rachel and Dolores, it also foreshadows Shutter Island’s conclusion.
This section also highlights a second tumultuous situation: the conflict within the field of mental health care. Earlier in Shutter Island, Cawley tells the marshals that the mental health field is embroiled in “‘ideological, philosophical, and yes, even psychological warfare’” (96). Cawley explains that historically, the severely mentally ill have been treated through psychosurgery, including transcranial lobotomies like George Noyce’s. But the tides of psychiatry have begun to shift, and more doctors have turned to psychotropic drugs to treat patients instead. While Cawley thinks psychosurgery is brutish, he has concerns about using drugs as a front-line treatment, too. He explains his reservations, saying medication is “‘a slippery slope’” where psychotropic drugs become the “‘standard response’” (97). When Teddy asks Cawley how he would prefer to treat patients, Cawley responds, “‘I believe in talk therapy….I have this radical idea that if you treat a patient with respect and listen to what he’s trying to tell you, you just might reach him’” (97). There are three camps in this battle, then: old-school psychosurgery, new-school psychotropics, and talk therapists.
If the state of mental health care is a war, then Teddy and Chuck walk in on a skirmish in this section of Shutter Island. Teddy and Chuck watch as Cawley argues against drugging a patient named Doris Walsh, citing studies that have shown how psychotropic drugs can cause brain damage similar to encephalitis or strokes. Dr. Naehring counters, saying that if the medicine can help the patient, then “‘[w]e must continue the research’” (160). Readers see the tension within the field play out in real-time, and it also offers readers the option to pick a side of their own. This scene also gives credence to Teddy’s suspicion that Ashecliffe’s doctors are violating the Nuremberg Code, which specifically forbids experimenting on humans “‘purely in the interest of science’” (153). This conversation—especially Naehring’s offhanded remark that Walsh is a “‘test patient’”—reinforces Teddy’s belief that Ashecliffe Hospital is using mental patients as “‘guinea pigs’” (160, 151). This section amplifies the tension in Shutter Island, and readers begin to believe that Teddy and Chuck really are in danger.
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