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see if she really did commit the murders or whether she is innocent.
Like Grace, Simon is represented in many ways; his narrative style, the letters to/from him, and the second epigraph before Young Man's Fancy.

Simon's narrative style is in the third person and, unlike Grace's narrative, it is orderly. His narrative is more detailed than Grace's. The way he thinks is important to his narrative and in understanding him as a character. For example, he tends to see women in one of two ways; as food, or as animals. The women he tends to see as food are the women who he finds himself sexually attracted to, almost as a metaphor towards his sexual appetite. The women he tends to see as animals are the women he sees as domesticated, as the animals he uses are domesticated animals, or animals that are used for a domesticated purpose, such as pigs.

In the letters to him, the reader's view of Simon is broadened. In the first letter to him, we find that he is almost obsessive about his work on Grace, inquiring about her, trying to find out whether the doctors working at the asylum at the times which she was committed believed she was in fact mad or not.

In the second letter to him, we are shown another side, a side in which Simon is a disappointment to his mother. His mother sees him as a wild man, because of his lack of a wife and a family, and a settled life. She says that she longs for Simon to marry and find a profession he can establish himself in properly, which she says because she dislikes his choice of profession. She even tells him that she has "grave doubts concerning [Simon's] future prospects," and that she has "never been able to understand the interest [Simon] takes in such things."
She tells Simon that he has always been an idealist, "filled with optimistic dreams", and that he should change his views now that he is thirty. This is showing the reader that Simon is susceptible to seeing the best in everyone, which his optimism.
She continues to push the issue of Simon's single life, and discusses a woman called Miss Faith Cartwright, whom she hopes Simon will marry.

The third letter to him, from Doctor Bannerling, reiterates Simon's thirst for knowledge on Grace's mental condition and his obsessive-like way of collecting it.

In Simon's letter to his friend Edward, we discover a lot about how Simon came to be in Canada, researching Grace's case. He dislikes his surrounds, and often makes fun of them, though never to anyone but Edward. He describes Grace, surprisingly, as "the gentle Grace", which is an unusual description for Simon to make about a woman.

There is only one epigraph that really links to Simon, and it is at the beginning of Young Man's Fancy. The epigraph is a quote from a letter from Dr. Joseph Workman, whose letter to Simon we see directly after the epigraphs, to Henry, "a young and troubled enquirer". It is discussing the fact that, in the 19th Century, not enough was known about the way a mind worked, and that Dr. Workman felt like a blindfolded child, groping his way, unsure of if he is going in the right direction or not. The epigraph ends with the phrase, "Someday, someone will remove that blindfold." Simon is using techniques which were very advanced for the time, and without them, some say that we may not have advanced to learn what we now know.

Atwood uses post-modern techniques, such as a fragmented structure, a disconnected and episodic narrative, and impressionistic characters, to make Alias Grace a novel which both excites and shocks the reader with regards to its characters, especially Grace Marks and Simon Jordan.

Learn more about this author, Stephanie Ayadassen.
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