Shutter Island – Teddy Daniel’s Visitation in relation to Iliad 24

 

In Shutter Island the audience spends the majority of the film thinking Teddy Daniels is a U.S. Marshall who is investigating a mental asylum only for the audience to find out by the end of the film that Daniels is a patient of the asylum, who created a fake life after murdering both his wife and children who visit him in a hauntingly beautiful dream state during the third act of the film. This is similar to the visitation Achilles receives in The Iliad. Both protagonists get a true view of what they have done through these dreams for the first time in the narrative, Achilles’ being that he “can 

have no thought of evil from the way you sleep still among your enemies,” for the first time making him realise that what he has done in battle makes him no better than those who he was fighting. This use of visitation dreams is haunting, making the audience realise that the person they have been supporting the majority of the plot is not actually the good person they originally believed them to be, therefore its effect is also to make the audience second guess themselves and view the story differently second time around.