Simon the Fiddler

“Thus they solidified as a group as musicians do, or perhaps their minds and thoughts precipitated out of the military suspension in which they had been held and so they once again became servants of music and not of the state.”

This passage illustrates the importance of music as a living presence in the novel; while the war and government may be able to claim the men’s identity briefly, music ultimately works as a higher power. The image of “suspension” implies that each musician’s time in the military was a sort of nonexistence; it is music and freedom that revives them and gives them purpose and meaning again. “Suspension” is also a musical term that means holding a dissonant note on in a chord before resolving into a consonant note; Jiles hence suggests that the lives of the musicians are about to resolve.

“Simon was only the fiddler of a defeated army, but he would have given a great deal to catch [Colonel Webb] alone. To have shoved that girl the way he did. He managed to smile at her, a quick bow.”

Simon reacts angrily when he feels personally wronged or slighted, but he is not necessarily always chivalrous. This passage takes place moments after he meets Doris and swiftly establishes that he already sees her as an extension of himself. Still, he practices restraint and does not try to confront the Colonel, foreshadowing the behavior that Doris will demand from him during the book’s climax.

“They came upon various sorts of people traveling back and forth between Brazos de Santiago Island and For Brown; provisions and equipment carried in the freight wagons, empty wagons going back for more, Yankee infantry on their way to the fort and people who seemed to have no particular identity or purpose in life slogging along like automatons in the heat. Men without uniforms or wearing parts of uniforms and men clad entirely in rags, who were most likely Confederates.”

This passage illustrates the complex life for Texan people after the Civil War’s end. The war may have officially ended, but people still wear parts of their uniforms regardless of what side they are on, symbolizing the way it will continue to scar the landscape. The writing style, full of added clauses and drawling lines, reflects the slow and meandering way that Simon observes the world around him.

“There was a great deal to do, much facing him in this new peacetime. If it was a peace, if military occupation was a peace, then it was alright with Simon as long as he could make music happen, as long as his girl did not float away into some windy unattainable sky, as long as he could make a living.”

Simon, like many of the other characters, is not overly concerned with the greater state of the world; his desires and wishes are much more self-focused. By emphasizing this, Jiles indirectly highlights the privileges of young white men at this time, since Simon does not fear being inhibited by political affairs.

“Simon at last lowered his bow and when he looked up, he saw the Creole girl holding a tray of smoking brisket, staring at him enraptured. The tune had been for her and her lover far away in New Orleans, and in the garden cressets he could see that her eyes shone with wet. He smiled at her, laid his bow alongside his leg, and bent in a very slight bow.”

This passage highlights the parallel between Simon and Doris and the Creole girl and her lover, and it also establishes Simon’s empathy for others. Despite his issues with anger, Simon understands the importance of music for others; this is one scene in which he uses his abilities to effect positive change.

“All the windows unbroken and the walls unscarred. How had they managed it? One lonely bullet mark on the wood framing of a fanlight. Carpet somewhat worn. Candies bright as toys in dishes. Her dress new and fresh and so was she, so slow, slow as an infant with the same deep impenetrable self-absorption.”

This passage relies on imagery—all in disjointed, incomplete sentences without verbs—to convey the eerie, static timelessness of the Pryor house. Even though some examples of the recent war exist, they are nothing in comparison to the beauty of the house. The house and Miss Pryor therefore reflect one another, existing in a prim, sheltered world.

“Doris is caught flatfooted with this astonishing rudeness and is silent. The driver glances down at her and shakes his head. She busies herself folding up her kit and putting it away. They never laugh, she thinks. They do not understand jokes and joy to them is as foreign as the bottom of the sea.”

The only passage consistently from Doris’s point of view changes tense to present tense, marking the change in perspective and creating an intimate sense that the narrative directly conveys her frame of mind. This passage contrasts her inner joy and delight with the bitterness of the Webbs, who reject her and treat her like a child for her love of the natural world. This contrast establishes Doris as the more noble member of the family, despite their social importance in comparison.

“Yellow fever was pacing up and down the streets and the back bayous of Galveston in long unseen steps, touching a child here and a strong man there and a sailor panting in his hammock belowdecks on a tied-up ship that was soon flying the yellow flag.”

This passage uses personification to establish the very real and unpredictable danger of yellow fever. Additionally, by listing the victims as a child and a strong man, Jiles uses contrast to further characterize the yellow fever as indiscriminate—anyone could fall victim to it, regardless of their status or health.

“He wrote on and on in his mind, words he might never use. Are you safe from that man? Are any of us safe from the yellow fever and its terrors? Is it possible that you might look favorably on an invitation from myself to an event (any event) in which I might hold your hand, a dance might occur, I might put my arm around your waist and we move down the center in the steps of the Virginia reel and leave death far behind us?”

This passage illustrates Simon’s fractured frame of mind after Patrick’s death. His questions start with safety and then descend into a long, run-on question about his love for Doris, reflecting his hopes running away with him.

“Boys, I hate to say it, but the owner here don’t want no raggedy-assed performers up in front of everybody here in this place, you know, the war’s over, everybody tired of being poor or looking like skillet-lickin’ dogs, people want to see players looking prosperous, cotton’s moving, things are better, you know, no offense. Y’all play good. People are looking for tone, you know.”

This passage emphasizes the importance of appearance, establishing why it is so vital that the men find a way to groom and dress themselves according to social standards. Additionally, however, the need to set a certain tone echoes the approaching Gilded Age, during which the appearance of success, despite the rampant reality of poverty, was vital.

“The alligator had no neck and its front feet were star-shaped and scaled. It looked like an afterthought God had come up with on the eighth day when all He had to hand was black rock and pure evil. It probably weighed three hundred pounds.”

This passage uses Biblical allusions to describe the horrifying appearance of the alligator. This builds contrast between an assumed Biblical respect for God’s creation and the hatred and fear the men feel for the alligator—by characterizing it as “pure evil,” it appears much more necessary to kill it.

“Two in the morning and the water of the bayou moving past, its surface hammered with firelit rain. No noise, no saloon full of yammering men. Somewhere a bittern made a deep boom like a ship’s horn and then fell into a series of gulping clicks. The stillness astounded him for a moment. He had forgotten that there was silence in the world.”

Throughout, the novel expresses a deep love and appreciation for the beauty of the natural world; this passage specifically contrasts that beauty with the ugliness of human society. Simon longs to exist in quiet. The sound imagery—boom, yammering, and clicks—emphasizes the importance of Simon’s music which turns sound into meaning.

“Simon sent a last letter to Doris, in which he rather exultantly said he was going into the south grasslands below the Nueces to find a man who had a parcel of land he wanted. That sounded mature, businesslike, substantial, and as if he were a man of standing.”

Simon constantly tries to achieve the markers of masculinity set by other men in the time period, such as owning land, in order to prove himself to Doris. Once more, Simon uses his letters to project an image of himself that does not necessarily exist.

“After the first phrase he double-stopped and the melody seemed to cry out of its own accord in several voices. It was a song that came to people as sadness, as memory, as longing. It was a kind of spirit unto itself, reflections of a mountain river that carried with it the souls of the ancient people who had lived there long before the white man came; the blue Shenandoah river, fifty-five miles long and clear as air.”

This passage uses imagery and poetic allusions to the history of the Shenandoah (a region in Virginia) to establish the power of music and memory. This passage contains one of the only references to Indigenous people within the text, referred to as “the ancient people.” This draws attention to their absence from dominant narratives about white people, including the novel itself.

“He felt he was approaching San Antonio as if it were an enemy city to be taken by stealth, at its heart a young woman who had been promised to him by some unknown means. He meant to have her. He had land now and real men owned land. So it had always been.”

The sweeping assumption at the end of the sentence and the description of their romance establishes the male-centric framework for the novel and for their romance. Simon assumes from the beginning that, at some point and in some way, he will possess Doris. The language of this passage reduces her to little more than an object to be traded or claimed, and it reflects the chivalric romance allusions since Simon desires to fight in his quest for a woman.

“Such a long way to come on the strength of having seen her twice, and of eight letters, half of them to a boy now dead. On the strength of his imagined home and his imagined wife. Of lying down in bed with her every night and waking up in the morning with her beside him.”

This passage ironically notes the absurdity of Simon and Doris’s tentative romance by highlighting that much of it exists in Simon’s mind. While Simon does not necessarily stop to think about his actions after realizing this, the passage nonetheless highlights the work he needs to do to make their relationship real instead of a fantasy. Jiles hence undermines the narrative form of chivalric romance in which the man undertakes a quest for a woman he often doesn’t know.

“This was how they got to know each other, men and women, and made momentous life decisions. And Doris was being denied this, and her far from home, from her own people and customs, from parents who might be of aid. Living in helpless terror of that villain. How alone she was. Images came to him: the colonel stalking her from one room to another. Not for long. Simon was having heroic thoughts. Rescuer’s thoughts. Savage thoughts.”

This passage follows a description of courtship rituals at the time, and Jiles suggests that Simon’s quest is as much about masculine pride as it is love. The colonel “stalking her” is the antagonist from whom Doris must be rescued; only Simon and the colonel are active participants in this paragraph, while Doris is rendered oppressed or rescued.This passage follows a description of courtship rituals at the time, and Jiles suggests that Simon’s quest is as much about masculine pride as it is love. The colonel “stalking her” is the antagonist from whom Doris must be rescued; only Simon and the colonel are active participants in this paragraph, while Doris is rendered oppressed or rescued.

“All around him he heard exclamations about how San Antonio was becoming cultured, as if there were no culture in the city beforehand. No Spanish. Neither fandangos nor watermelon races nor Day of the Dead processions, and he stood unclasping the fiddle case and thought about it but not for long.”

This passage emphasizes the cultural diversity in San Antonio and the attitude of colonization the Americans have towards the Mexican culture, which they view as nonexistent or inferior. Even though Simon contemplates this, he does not think about it for long, in some ways making him complicit in the erasure of San Antonio’s own culture in favor of American homogeneity.

“Mrs. Webb regarded Doris with lofty distaste but behind it was dread of more of the same in years to come and for a second Doris was sorry for her and her precarious existence, but she had other matters to deal with.”

This passage illustrates the potential for sympathy and understanding between women in a society that does not value them or their desires. Still, Doris cannot effectively channel this sympathy, as Mrs. Webb herself does not try to view Doris as a person; she is simply a vehicle through which Mrs. Webb can express her negative emotions about her situation.

“That first step into the waltz with the left foot is like a boat into the rapids of the music, the first step into a long slide down a snowy glorious slope. A door opens into a palace made of lamplight, where all the men are just and courageous and all the women are beautiful and wise. They were in faultless motion together, his hand closed on her waist and all those emerald skirts flying out, her head on his shoulder.”

This passage transforms Doris and Simon’s romance from an illusion into a real thing of fairytale beauty, despite the ugliness of the world around them. The passage parallels men and women as opposites here, highlighting the ideal characteristics for both—just and courageous versus beautiful and wise. This further emphasizes the strictly gendered dynamics of the novel.

“He was for a moment discouraged with all of humanity’s history of dismal marital confusions—the failures, the weirdnesses, and the tangled webs. He thought of stories in the Old Testament that recalled the hot jealousies and rages of men and women from ancient times when they used bows and arrows and swords, and no one had ever heard of a railroad or a telegraph and yet somehow the stories were just like modern times today in 1867.”

For Simon, humanity’s overall consistency, regardless of time period or culture, provides both comfort and disillusionment. This passage is metatextual, asking the reader to identify with a story that takes place over 200 years ago just as Simon identifies with characters in the Bible.

“In this book are one thousand four hundred and seventy-one stories of human beings joining themselves in Holy Matrimony for better or for worse and done often in a heedless haste and others after years of senseless dithering. Often it does not work out and misery and parting are their lot; at other times mistakes are rectified and another attempt is made but human beings never stop trying their hand at matrimony; it seems to be a universal law.”

Many passages in the novel, including this one, emphasize concepts of humanity as “universal,” such as the desire to marry. Contextually, the Justice of the Peace’s words here emphasize the inevitability of Simon and Doris’s decision to wed, but the passage nonetheless equates humanity to marriage. This highlights that the powerful establish dominant culture, calling into question the voices that are not represented in the text such as Black and Indigeous people.

“Frelich carefully returned the pieces to the U.S. Mail sack. Watching him do it Simon realized that the Markneukirche had saved him one last time. One last time.”

The repetition at the end of this quotation emphasizes the sorrow he feels at the fiddle’s loss. Additionally, Simon’s insistence on using the fiddle’s proper title—after the town in which it was likely made, Markneukirchen, Germany—transforms it from an object into a character. Personifying the fiddle evokes pathos around its “death.”