I don’t like burying the lede and I try to make sure to get my main point across early, even in the title if possible. But in this case we’re talking about a major spoiler to the novel Shutter Island so I’m being deliberately vague.
I know that even knowing that a work is unusually spoilable and twist-laden is in and of itself a spoiler so I’m hoping the title I chose, “How Shutter Island got the name wrong”, doesn’t ruin that much for people who haven’t read it and are just scrolling through a list of essay titles.
Because this essay is gonna talk about stuff that only makes sense if you do know the ending to this book (and as I understand it, the movie does follow the book very closely). So from now on, read on at your own peril.
Okay, here we go.
One thing that would’ve made a lot more sense in Shutter Island would’ve been if the patient’s real name would’ve been the same as the detective; Edward Daniels.
Because it makes more sense medically that someone would forget two years of their life and why they’re on the island and why they’re no longer a US marshal, than that someone would forget all of that and also their name. For example, anterograde amnesia could explain the time gap but even then he’d still know his own name.
Global amnesia (having retrograde and anterograde amnesia at the same time) is common but in this particular case the patient does seem to mostly remember his own past. The name thing is so out of place from the rest of the symptoms.
And it’s strange how small the fix would’ve been and how little else in the book would’ve changed. He could still have been looking for “Andrew Laeddis” since all the clues were in anagrams. He never even looked at the intake form so that could’ve said “Edward Daniels” all along.