Want to learn the ideas in Shutter Island better than ever? Read the world’s #1 book summary of Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane here.
Read a brief 1-Page Summary or watch video summaries curated by our expert team. Note: this book guide is not affiliated with or endorsed by the publisher or author, and we always encourage you to purchase and read the full book.
Video Summaries of Shutter Island
We’ve scoured the Internet for the very best videos on Shutter Island, from high-quality videos summaries to interviews or commentary by Dennis Lehane.
1-Page Summary of Shutter Island
Overview
The book takes place in 1954 and focuses on U.S Marshall Teddy Daniels as he goes to Shutter Island, where the criminally insane are kept, with his partner Chuck. They’re looking for Rachel Solando, who has disappeared from the island.
Teddy Daniels, a patient at Ashecliffe Hospital on Shutter Island, is investigating the disappearances of his fellow patients. He suspects that there’s someone else on the island who shouldn’t be there and that drugs are being tested on those criminals. Teddy learns about Rachel Solando (an anagram for Dolores Chanal), a woman claiming to be missing from the hospital, who has been hiding out in one of the caves. She tells him that he has been given psychotropic drugs by Dr. Cawley and Chuck Aule (his psychiatrist). He then decides to confront Dr. Cawley because he believes he knows what is going on with these experiments but doesn’t know why they’re happening or how far they’ve gone.
The ending is ambiguous, because you don’t know if Teddy’s really Andrew or not.
Prologue / Day One
Summary of the Preface
A novel begins with a journal entry by Dr. Lester Sheehan, dated May 3, 1993. He expresses his desire to set down his memories about the time he spent at Ashecliffe Hospital on Shutter Island as a doctor now that he is close to death and fears that his memory is going. Memories are like bookmarks in a book; they help us keep track of what we’ve read so far. They flutter away when we die or get old because their pages fall out of our hands and blow away in the wind.
The author recalls a mental hospital in the book that was built during the Civil War. It’s a beautiful building, and it has an interesting history dating back to 1954 when Teddy Daniels visited it. He wants to tell us what happened at Ashecliffe Hospital as accurately as possible because Teddy hated lies.
Sheehan also recalls that the island was filled with rats, and that there was an island just off the coast called Paddock Island. It would be above water for two hours every day, but it was too far away from the main hospital to reach in time. Many of the patients attempted to swim there anyway, which meant they often drowned trying to get there. However, one rat did make it back alive. Sheehan thinks about Andrew Laeddis (the character Teddy Daniels is based on), as well as Dolores Chanal and Rachel Solando (characters from Shutter Island). He believes that if Teddy had seen this rat swimming back home safely, he would have clapped his hands with joy.
The First Day
Rachel’s Diary
The novel switches to the perspective of a U.S. Marshal named Teddy Daniels, who is arriving at Shutter Island by ferry in 1954 with his partner Chuck Aule. Teddy’s seasickness reminds him of his father, an unsuccessful fisherman who was unable to keep up the payments on his boat and later died in a storm after being caught out at sea during one terrible night. Teddy recalls when he was young and went fishing with his father for the first time; he was too overwhelmed by how big the ocean seemed to be that day and spent most of it sick from motion sickness on board their boat as they struggled to catch fish all day long without any luck before returning home empty-handed that evening after an exhausting trip filled with disappointment over not catching anything despite hours spent trying their hardest together as a family while out on those boats in search of food for their table back home (Teddy also mentions feeling shamed because he had been so ill).
Teddy, who is seasick, cleans himself in the boat’s toilet. He notices his tie and thinks about how he misses his wife. She died recently and he fears that he is forgetting her. Teddy chats with Chuck, a fellow Marshal who has delicate hands for such a tough guy (he also spent time in an internment camp). Teddy is psychologically astute; just recently, he cracked a high profile case. However, Chuck isn’t well-known among the Marshals because of his girlfriend—she was Japanese during World War II and spent time in an internment camp.
