Tom Sawyer, the main character of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, written by Mark Twain, is an average boy who is bored with his civilized life and escapes these constraints by pulling pranks. The character, Tom is presented as a realistic and convincing boy. He is kind and loving, but also cruel, stupid, and hypocritical. As the story progresses, Tom shows signs of maturity. The story of Tom Sawyer, is about how children mature and make their own mistakes.
Tom is shown, throughout the story, as a typical boy of his time. He has a loving, happy home, with his devoted Aunt Polly to care for him. He is restricted by his home routine of prayers, meals, chores, bedtime, etc, but when his routine life gets too dull, he has the nearby river and woods, where he can go to escape. Though Tom is not "the model boy" of the village.
Tom Sawyer (1973 film)
Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Becky Thatcher i...
Frontispiece from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by ...He plays boyish pranks on Aunt Polly, Sid, his friends, and everyone in town. He steals, lies, plays hooky, fights, and goes swimming secretly, but he is a normal boy, he does what normal boys do at his age. Tom is also an imaginative boy who has a good knowledge about human behavior and knows how to use it. He continually outwits his Aunt Polly, and also persuades other boys to do his work for him, without them even knowing of his trickery. One example of this is in the whitewashing scene, when his Aunt Polly makes him whitewash the outside fence before he is allowed to play. He slyly convinces the first boy by saying "...I don't see why oughtn't like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence everyday?" (21) With this cunning use of words he manipulates the boy to whitewash the...