49 pages • 1 hour read
Simon the Fiddler
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Chapters 1-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: The source material contains themes of war, violence, and sexual assault.
The novel opens in Texas in October 1864. The protagonist, Simon, is a young man who can—and does—pass for 15 if not examined too closely. He uses this guise to escape conscription into the Confederate Army, but during a fiddle performance at a party in Texas, conscription men show up and try to take Simon to serve in the army. Simon threatens violence, but the plantation owner takes Simon and hides him in the icehouse instead. He buries himself in the sawdust and ice until it is safe to come out and successfully escapes conscription for another day.
Simon continues to wander East Texas and play his fiddle, earning money and saving as much as he can and attempting to not let his fierce temper get the better of him. He is not an especially gifted fiddle player but has a seemingly endless supply of songs to play, making him a great performer. In March 1865, however, he plays in a public house and gets into a fight after a drunk man tries to take and play his fiddle. Unable to escape the bar in time, the conscription men take Simon to play in a regimental band, ignoring his cries about his age.
Unwilling to give up all his freedom, Simon gives a false last name—Walters—to ensure that he is at the bottom of any lists and lies about nearly every other detail about himself for good measure. His regiment ends up in a camp on the Rio Grande, but since the war is nearly over, little fighting happens. He meets the band’s tin whistle player, Damon Lessing. Simon refuses to play his fiddle for marches and teaches himself to play one of the whistles instead, since Damon can’t play all of them due to an old injury to his hand.
As May approaches, Simon grows increasingly frustrated with his lot in life and with his companions. Time moves slowly at the camp and Simon contemplates his future. He imagines his dream girl; all the girls he has been with either dislike him for his roving, disreputable career or don’t understand music enough to interest him, and his short stature means that many girls aren’t interested in him to begin with.
Chapter 2 Summary
Federal troops attack the camp during a storm in early May, sending the entire regiment into chaos. Simon runs back to the camp during the retreat to get his fiddle, but an officer threatens him; he reluctantly takes a gun and returns to his hiding place to wait for further instructions. At dawn, Simon sees a retreating Federal soldier and shoots him down, then discovers that someone stole his fiddle. Soon after, the Confederates surrender; Simon steals a revolver and disassembles it to sell later. At the fort during the surrender, however, Simon sees a Union soldier with his fiddle and hat and attacks him; Simon is promptly arrested and put in a punishment cell for two hours.
When he is released, the soldiers give Simon back his instrument and stick him with some other musicians to make a new band. Simon decides that the musicians, Confederate and Union both, need payment for their services, and all the musicians clean themselves up and steal clothes so that they can look like civilians again. After this, they discuss and plan what music to play, finally feeling like individuals and musicians rather than soldiers.
Chapter 3 Summary
As Simon prepares to play for the gathered armies, he is distracted by the governess of an important Union family. Her beauty and gentle, intelligent mannerisms captivate him, as well as the fact that she is shorter than he is. To get close to her, he takes the banjo player’s advice and goes to ask Colonel Webb, her employer, what the ladies would like them to play first. To Simon’s disapproval, the Colonel pushes the governess out of the way like she is meaningless. The governess requests a song from Ireland, much to the Colonel’s distaste, and Simon knows the song that she requests; they successfully play it. After a night of playing music, Simon goes to Colonel Webb and asks for pay, but the Colonel tells him to take up a collection. They gather 17 dollars, then Simon returns the shirts they had stolen to the sergeant. After commenting on Simon’s impertinence, he reluctantly shares that the girl, Doris Dillon, is under a labor contract for three years, and they will hang any man who tries to court her during that time. Then the sergeant irritably sends Simon away.
Chapter 4 Summary
Simon watches the women in the Webb household prepare the wagon to travel to San Antonio. Wanting Doris to remember him, he plays an Irish melody by the road as they pass, and she waves at him. He begins to plan for a future with her in it, even though he has little idea how he will provide for nor find her again. He slips away from the camp without a formal discharge, but the musicians from the makeshift band follow him. Three of them choose to travel with Simon: Damon, Doroteo (a Mexican American, or Tejano), and Patrick, a 13-year-old boy.
To reach Galveston, they decide to steal a boat from the Union. They reach the shore and nap in the shaded sand, and Simon watches the ocean and daydreams about Doris. Eventually, they steal a boat and successfully take it out into the Gulf of Mexico, but the journey is hard, and they struggle to navigate the pitching waves. Patrick shares that he talked to Doris and learned that Doris and the Webbs are going to live at the Alamo for the time being. They eventually see the coast again but continue their journey to Galveston.
Chapter 5 Summary
The musicians continue to travel, slowly running out of water as the sun grows more brutal. Patrick grows increasingly seasick. Night approaches, and they see Galveston in the distance, glowing with gaslit streetlamps. They reach land, set the boat adrift to prevent suspicion, and go in search of water and a place to rest, avoiding soldiers out of fear of being caught for deserting the army. They find a ramshackle saloon and take refuge there for the night.
The next day, they discuss finding more permanent residence, despite their lack of money. Simon keeps the $30 that he has stashed secret, intending to use it to buy land in the future. A man on the street tells them to go to the shack town near the seaside and find an empty house amid the ruins there. They find a suitable shack and begin to turn it into a home.
Chapter 6 Summary
The band buys fish and prepares it. Simon, dehydrated and exhausted, imagines ladies sailing in hoop skirts, including Doris and his mother. Eventually the men begin to put together their band in earnest. They try to clean themselves up and go over the music that they all know how to play.
Most of the establishments have bands already or turn them away, either only wanting Simon or not impressed with their lack of coordination. Eventually, they talk with a flute player they met at the saloon, Peter Hendrick. He recommends that they watch out for hurricanes and yellow fever.
The band finds employment at a saloon, but this only last two days before a better band replaces them. Patrick insults the owner and Simon threatens Patrick afterwards, irritated that he would endanger their ability to get work; tensions begin to rise. They decide to practice more and learn some songs and improve their instrumental abilities. They scrounge for food and Doroteo cooks what they can get.
Eventually, they get work at the Jamaica and the Windjammer saloons. They get into a bar fight after a man insults Damon’s injured hand, but they successfully play and enchant the crowd even after the fight ends.
Chapters 1-6 Analysis
The first six chapters of the novel quickly establish Simon’s character, motivations, and interests, as well as introducing the main characters that will influence and shape his life. From the first page, the novel shows that Simon does not follow the same code of masculinity that other characters follow; rather than trying to join the military and prove himself, he pretends to be a teenager to avoid conscription. This introduces the theme of War, Violence, and the Complex Signifiers of Masculinity; while characters like Colonel Webb define themselves and their masculinity by their behavior in war and their dominance over others, Simon creates a much more unique identity. Even after the army conscripts him, he stakes his identity as a person on his fiddle, freeing him from the militaristic mindset of the men around him. The fiddle symbolizes freedom and independence, which Simon values. Even so, violence still serves Simon, who is willing to harm others to protect the things he cares about. While he may have established his own set of signifiers for his masculine identity, he still uses violence at will to defend himself. The war ends by the end of this section, foreshadowing the fact that the men in the story will have to find other methods by which to define themselves in the new, postwar world. Jiles’s representation of quotidian violence alongside the war suggests that, while the end of a war signals a crisis of masculinity, violence persists to regulate patriarchal standards.
Additionally, at the novel’s beginning, Simon is essentially directionless. His only behavior is running; he has no real goals and nothing to fight for except avoiding the military. Only when the army—and thereby Doris—enter his life does he begin to pursue a goal, dragging Damon, Doroteo, and Patrick along in his wake. This establishes the theme of Maturity Through Pursuing a Goal, which all the characters, not just Simon, will learn over their slow odyssey to San Antonio. On both a narrative level and a personal level, the novel quickly shows that people who run from things rather than run to things will never grow or develop a real identity. The characters require a goal to fight for to move and develop. Jiles underscores this by incorporating nostos into the text–a common format in Ancient Greek literature in which an epic hero returns home from war by sea, overcoming obstacles and achieving a level of status when they arrive. Simon and his band complete their difficult journey across the Gulf and go in search of a new home, which signals the beginning of maturity. Jiles also uses appearances, specifically through the motif of clothing, to show Simon’s desire for growth and maturity. Rather than just using his youthful appearance to hide from the Confederates, he weaponizes the way he and the other men look to earn them pay and better jobs, all with the goal of progressing towards Doris and earning his place in the world.
While the other men in the band are important, the heart of the novel’s opening chapters—and the rest of the novel by extension—is Doris Dillon. However, she is reduced to an imagined projection after her first appearance. Due to her contract with the Webbs, she has minimal personal freedom, and Simon is left to wonder about her personality and falls in love with the version of her that he constructs in his head. Doris’s lack of real characterization means that she is not yet a person with agency. She matches Simon’s idea of a perfect woman and initiates his internal arc and growth, but she ultimately starts the story as an object in a story exclusively focused on men. Simon’s treatment of her is no less objectifying than the Colonel’s, even if it is far less violent. Doris has no chance in the story’s opening to claim personhood except by quietly asking for a song from her homeland. The book quickly establishes the patriarchal dynamics in this way; even though Doris is later shown to have a rich inner life of her own, her narrative exists to bolster Simon’s in this story, just as the other women, like the Webbs, are caught in the whirlpool of Colonel Webb’s power dynamics.
Nevertheless, through Doris, Simon finally finds a satisfying outlet for his music on an emotional level—rather than just using it to make money, he uses it to express his feelings to her by playing her Irish songs, expressing Music as a Universal Language and Form of Connection. While Simon knows next to nothing personally about Doris, he can use music to communicate that he likes what he does know about her.
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