Cogito ergo sum: Criminal Logic and Mad Discourse in Shutter Island

Abstract

The philosophical discussion of reason and the boundary between sanity and madness has been a contentious topic since long before the Enlightenment. This problematic boundary is discussed at length in Dennis Lehane’s thriller Shutter Island (2003) and in the Martin Scorsese film adaptation of the same name (2009). The protagonist of Shutter Island, US Marshal Teddy Daniels, visits a psychiatric prison complex for the criminally insane to search for a missing patient while operating under his own agenda of finding Andrew Laeddis, his wife’s killer. The book and the surprisingly faithful film adaptation follow Daniels as his investigation on the island forces him to confront his own fractured psyche: that Daniels is Laeddis and has created an elaborate fantasy world to avoid confronting the guilt he feels over neglecting his wife’s obvious mental illness, leading her to drown their three children, and his own fatal act in her murder. Lehane constructs Shutter Island as a conscious meditation on the blurred boundary between the animalistic violence of the madman, highlighted in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century confinement discourses and Descartes’s best-known contribution to philosophy, cogito ergo sum, also known as the cogito. The syllogistic logic of the well-known maxim I think, therefore I am is examined throughout the novel in Daniels’s conversations with both partner Chuck Aule and island psychiatrist Dr Cawley about missing patient and convicted murderer Rachel Solando, whose disappearance serves as the inciting incidence in Daniels’s visit to the island.

Better a tale with a barbed moral and a tragic ending than no story at all. (Porter 2006)