The Adventures of Tom Sawyer- Mark Twain

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain, is a classic novel about a young boy and his adventures. Tom is a young boy who would rather be lazy and do nothing all day. An example is when Tom convinces his friends into painting his white picket fence, by telling them that it is fun and they should be jealous of him. He does this multiple times, to many kids in the neighborhood so he can sit back, relax and watch. This story is also about the adventures that Tom and his famous friends, Huckleberry Finn, Becky Thatcher, Joe Harper and Injun Joe, have. One of his adventures with Huckleberry and Joe Harper is when the three of them run away from home. They decide they have had enough of their parents, and guardians in Tom’s case, yelling at them and telling them what to do, so they decide to run away. They swim across a river where they stay for about one and a half days, until they decide that they are too homesick and want to be with their families. Becky Thatcher and Tom have and interesting relationship; originally Tom liked a girl named Amy until he saw Becky. He then told Becky that he loved her and was engaged to her; she loved him too, until she finds out about Amy. Then, she doesn’t like him anymore and they try and win each other back throughout the book. Eventually, it seems like Tom has won Becky back until they get lost in a cave while they are on their way to Becky’s “party”. They get stuck in the cave for a long time because no one has figured out that they are gone yet. They have already run out of food and candles by this point; and to make things worse, they come across Injun Joe.
Injun Joe is a criminal who Tom and Huckleberry first come across in the graveyard one night at around midnight. They see him with his friend Muff Potter, and a doctor. Injun Joe wants to get back at the doctor, and kills him. Tom and “Huck” witness the whole event and desperately want to tell the police, but they are afraid of what will happen to them. After this, Injun Joe does not want to get blamed for the crime, so he disguises himself as a Spaniard who is deaf and mute. The boys encounter him again when they are on an adventure looking for buried treasure while he is actually doing the same thing. He ends up finding the money before the boys and hides it. Huck begins to follow him just waiting to steal the treasure. While Tom is looking for a way out of the cave that he and Becky are trapped in, he finds that he is using the cave as a hideout. Eventually, Tom and Becky get out of the cave, Injun Joe is stopped, and the money ends up being Tom and Huck’s. This story relates to today because there are plenty of kids who feel like they want to run away from home, or who want to go on adventures, just like Tom did.
An example of a major symbol was tickets that the children of the town got from Sunday School. They would recite verses from the bible and earn tickets, until they have achieved their ultimate goal of getting a bible. Tom trades his friends for the tickets that he gets because Tom doesn’t know any verses, unlike other children. This symbolizes Tom’s ticket through life: he just gets people to do things for him while Tom gets all of the credit. Another example could be the white picket fence. Other literary elements used in this novel were imagery and foreshadowing. Twain does an excellent job of “painting the picture in the readers mind”. He describes the setting really well, but still does a good job of making the reader think about it from their point of view. He also uses foreshadowing, for example right at the beginning of the book. The reader finds out that Tom hates being at home and doing chores, and from reading that, the reader can tell that something dramatic will happen later in the book.