The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a novel by Mark Twain, introduces Tom and Huckleberry Finn. It is often classified as a children’s story, but still holds literary merit. Tom’s desire to uncover evil tasks and find treasure is the main plot, with scenes of moral code and determination. The book ends with Tom remaining unchanged, while Huck undergoes significant change. The sequels restore their relationship.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a novel by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), first published in 1876. It introduces the reader not only to the character of Tom, but also to Huckleberry Finn, a significant character in the history of literature and in the canon literary. Unlike Twain’s 1884 novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is considered by many to be one of the most important works of American literature, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is often classified as a children’s story and does not contain the same literary merit as Finnish Huckleberry.
The story contained in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer certainly makes for a much “lighter” book with less mature themes and more escapist tendencies. This does not necessarily mean that it should be excluded from the category of “literature”. As children’s book writers such as JK Rowling have shown, sometimes “lighter matters for children” are written as much as deeper topics. It is true that the novel at first did not inspire overwhelming love and affection from the readers. Yet Tom Sawyer and his friends grew in readership after a while, and the book was wildly popular in the early 20th century.
Readers of all types can find much truth in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Tom is a nice boy, much more inclined to play than work or school, who is raised by his Aunt Polly in the South before the Civil War. Although the beginning of the novel is a series of vignettes, the most famous of which is Tom’s ability to trick several other children into painting a fence making it look like the most desirable job in the world, the novel soon sets its sights on main: Tom’s desire to uncover the evil tasks of Injun Joe and to discover an important buried treasure.
There are several worthy scenes in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that are worth mentioning. Though he abstains from work, Tom operates within a good moral code. When he is called to testify in Muff Potter’s trial, he risks his life by claiming that it was really Injun Joe who killed Dr. Robinson. Later in the book, he lets the city authorities know that Injun Joe is hiding in caves that he discovered with his love Becky Thatcher at her birthday party. Another really wonderful scene is Tom and Huck’s determination to attend their own funeral, after they run off to play pirates for a few days.
Tom Sawyer ends on an innocent and unambiguous note, and Tom has gone through little change as a character. Indian Joe turns up dead, and Tom and Huck find a huge buried treasure that makes them both rich. The character remains similar across several sequels, looking at the world as a game and holding a Peter Pan view of not wanting to grow up. The same cannot be said of Huck, who undergoes a significant change into Huckleberry Finn and to some extent resents Tom’s boyish exuberance in his brief appearance in the book. Their relationship is restored with the lighter-hearted sequels Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective, both first-person narratives of Huck.
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