Shutter Island

“She said once that time is nothing to me but a series of bookmarks that I use to jump back and forth through the text of my life, returning again and again to the events that mark me, in the eyes of my more astute colleagues, as bearing all the characteristics of the classic melancholic.”

Dr. Sheehan, a retired psychiatrist, is reflecting back on his experiences while a doctor at Ashecliffe Hospital. He introduces the prominent motif of time, especially the ways in which people are haunted by their past experiences. Likewise, this also sets up the way in which Lehane uses time in Shutter Island. Instead of working chronologically, time is fluid in Lehane’s novel; like Sheehan, Teddy jumps back and forth between the past and present as he struggles to understand what is happening at Ashecliffe Hospital and within himself. 

“‘But do we lose our past to assure our future?’ Chuck flicked his cigarette out into the foam. ‘That’s the question. What do you lose when you sweep a floor, Teddy? Dust. Crumbs that would otherwise draw ants. But what of the earring she misplaced? Is that in the trash now, too?’”

Chuck is specifically talking about the future of psychiatric hospitals, which he supposes will be shut down one day, and which will in turn leave people who are dangerously mentally ill with no place to go. But Chuck’s metaphor also speaks to a larger theme in the novel: the tension between the past and the future. While moving forward is important, Chuck warns that letting go of the past can also mean losing something precious. 

“McPherson said, ‘In a less enlightened age, a patient like [Vincent] Gryce would have been put to death. But here they can study him, define a pathology, maybe isolate the abnormality in his brain that caused him to disengage so completely from acceptable patterns of behavior. If they can do that, maybe we can reach a day where that kind of disengagement can be rooted out of our society entirely.’”

This quotation highlights Ashecliffe’s progressive philosophy; the doctors are not just trying to treat mental illness, they are trying to find a cure. However, McPherson’s statement also implies that the patients at Ashecliffe are also test subjects, which confirms Teddy’s suspicions about the hospital.