Tag Archives: adventurous

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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Tom sawyer

 

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer paints a picture of a young boy who is indeed adventurous. Despite his wild, reckless side he is also very calculating and manipulative. Another side that I found interesting is the very dramatic part of his persona. When his aunt Polly mistakenly  “belts” him for dropping the sugar bowl in Chapter 3, Tom takes great pleasure in the fact that his aunt is visibly remorseful. He starts to think about how it would be if he were “lying sick unto his death” and his aunt would be trying to seek forgiveness but he would turn his face away from her. Then he takes it a step further, envisioning himself dead and his aunt throwing herself on top of his lifeless body begging God for forgiveness for abusing him. I found this humorous because he has such an overactive imagination. I love this character because he is 100% authentic, there are no pretenses with Tom. He is everything that he wants to be without anything or anyone holding him back. It can be considered self-centered but it’s fun to read about since most people try to abide by rules. Tom is keenly perceptive and is a bit of a social scientist, conducting experiments on anyone he comes in contact with and trying to figure out how to get what he wants.

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A Few Things

I particularly enjoyed reading The Adventure’s of Tom Sawyer however I found some things to be interesting.

I recall from class how there was somewhat of a consensus about how Alice talking out loud to herself at various moments was, for lack of a better word, strange. I am therefore curious about how the few beginning scenes would be reconciled. Between page four and five Aunt Polly speaks a large paragraph out loud to no one but the reader and herself. To me it appears to be a sort of filler/introduction as to the nature of Tom Sawyer. This also happens after Tom is caught by his Aunt Polly and as he’s running away he speaks about how she always switches the color of the stitching on the collar.

I also think it’s really important to mention the words being used here. The slang used by the characters speaking such as: nuff’, lick you, singed cat, pumped on our heads… and many more examples. These can be compared to the language of the narrator which at times is simple but also contains what appears to me to be extravagant words for children such as: ambuscade, adamantine reposeful, ponderously, daintily… and many more examples. This brings me back to the beginning of the year when we had to read that text about an intended reader for specific works. If the group of people in the authors group had deemed the poem they’d read inappropriate for children since it had contained two made up words, how would parents reconcile this novel? These days the slang would not be well known, personally I had to do a google search to understand some of the things that were being said, and the large words I can only assume not all children would know without asking or looking them up. I also think that this combination of words make an interesting comparison. Through comparing both slang and high profile words we get somewhat of a muddling between understanding these characters and attempting to relate to them while being fed differently worded descriptions [perhaps coming from an elite of people not used to the slang].

Another thing, all the talk about curiosity in Alice also got to me as I was reading about Tom Sawyer and his “adventurous, troublesome ways,” [5]. Is being adventurous or curious ever considered a good quality for children or is it solely bad leading to mischief and connoting of something absolutely negative?

The last thing I really wanted to bring up was the paragraph on pages nineteen and twenty. Not because I really wanted to discuss it more so I thought that it was a really cool statement by Twain and an amazing example of what I believe to be satire. It shows the master of satire doing what he does best.