Meet Tom

Totally imaginative

Opposite of Huck

Mischievous

Tom Sawyer's Gang

Tom Sawyer, (Twain wrote about him in the prequel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,) is one of Huck's friends. Huck looks up to Tom and puts Tom's ideas in front of his own gut.  "I did wish Tom Sawyer was there; I knowed he would take an interest in this kind of business, and throw in the fancy touches.  Nobody could spread himself like Tom Sawyer in such a thing as that."  (33).

In the beginning of the novel, Tom creates a gang of robbers called "Tom Sawyer's Gang" with some other local boys.  Tom is very imaginative, and the gang's adventures are based off adventure books that Tom has read.  The gang does not do any real harm (besides scaring a Sunday school class's picnic), but the gang reveals that Tom is very different from the logical, practical Huck.

Unlike Huck, Tom has a stable home life.  Ironically, (good planning, Mark Twain!) Silas and Sally Phelps are Tom's relatives.  But, Tom can be selfish and place his want for adventure ahead of others' best interest.  For example, Tom knows that Jim is free, but insists on creating an elaborate escape that is not even needed and adds more complicated measures to it.  Tom serves as a symbol of Romanticism in the novel, which adds humor (mainly in the beginning) and a cutting edge (mainly in the end) to the novel.

"Here was a boy [Tom] that was respectable and well brung up; and had a character to lose; and folks at home that had characters; and he was bright and not leather-headed; and knowing and not ignorant; and not mean, but kind; and yet here he was, without any more pride, or rightness feeling, than otstoop to this business, and make himself a shame, and his family a shame, before everybody."  (233).

Pictures:

First picture courtesy of: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/76/old/orig76-h/p1.htm