The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Tom Sawyer lives with his Aunt Polly, his well-behaved half-brother Sid and his cousin Mary in the river village of St. Petersburg. Twain never tells us Tom’s exact age. He skips school, fights new boys, and trades for marbles and bits of junk. When Aunt Polly sentences him to whitewash thirty yards of fence on a Saturday, he tricks the other boys into paying him for the privilege of doing the job.

Tom falls for Becky Thatcher, the judge’s daughter who has just moved to town. He also admires Huckleberry Finn, the son of the town drunk, who sleeps where he likes and never has to wash or go to school. One midnight Tom and Huck sneak into the graveyard to try a cure for warts with a dead cat. They see three men robbing a grave: young Dr. Robinson, the harmless drunk Muff Potter, and Injun Joe. A fight breaks out, and Injun Joe stabs the doctor with Potter’s knife, then convinces the dazed Potter that he did it himself. Terrified of Joe, the boys swear in blood never to tell.

Guilty and heartsick, Tom runs away with Huck and Joe Harper to be pirates on Jackson’s Island. The town decides they have drowned. The boys slip back on the day of their funeral and walk into church in the middle of their own funeral sermon.

At Muff Potter’s murder trial, Tom’s conscience wins. He testifies that Injun Joe was the killer, and Joe leaps through the courtroom window and escapes. Later, hunting for buried treasure in a haunted house, Tom and Huck watch Injun Joe, disguised as a deaf and mute Spaniard, dig up a box of gold. Huck follows him one night and overhears his plan for revenge on the Widow Douglas. Huck runs for help to the Welshman’s house, and the attack is stopped.

At a picnic, Tom and Becky wander too deep into McDougal’s cave and are lost for days. In the dark Tom sees Injun Joe, who is hiding there. Tom finally finds a way out. Becky’s father then has the cave door sealed with iron, not knowing Joe is inside. When Tom hears this, the town rushes to the cave and finds Injun Joe dead of starvation behind the door. Tom and Huck go back into the cave and find the gold: a little over twelve thousand dollars. The Widow Douglas takes Huck in to raise him properly, and he can barely stand it. Tom talks him into staying by promising that respectable boys can still join his new robber gang.

The fence

Tom’s Saturday punishment is the most famous scene in the book. When Ben Rogers comes by to tease him about working, Tom acts as if whitewashing were an art:

“Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?”

Ben ends up paying an apple to take a turn. Then the narrator steps in as a mock philosopher, with a “law” that is half joke and half truth:

“Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.”

The joke is on the boys, but also on adults: the same chapter mocks “wealthy gentlemen in England” who pay to drive coaches for fun but would quit if they were paid to do it.

His own funeral

The pirates’ return in Chapter 17 is pure theater. The minister’s sermon praises the boys so much that the mourners sob, and then:

“They had been hid in the unused gallery listening to their own funeral sermon!”

Tom gets what every child secretly wishes for: proof of how much everyone would miss him. Twain lets him enjoy it, then lets Aunt Polly’s hurt in Chapters 18 and 19 show what the prank cost.

How the humor works

• The mock-serious narrator. Twain describes boys’ business in grand language, as if a pinchbug in church were a great battle.
• Irony. The narrator says one thing and means another, as when he calls the pardon-seekers “weaklings.”
• Satire. Sunday school, sermons, Examination Day compositions and town gossip all get skewered.
• Dialogue. Tom’s and Huck’s talk catches how real Missouri boys spoke, years before Twain let Huck narrate a whole book.

Tom Sawyer is often treated as a gentle children’s classic, but it reflects the prejudices of the time it describes and the time it was written. Enjoy the comedy, but notice who the jokes, and the fears, are aimed at.

Injun Joe as a stereotype

The novel’s villain is called only “Injun Joe,” and the narrator often calls him a “half-breed.” “Injun” was a mocking way of saying “Indian.” We use the name on this page only because it is the only name the book gives him.

Twain gives Joe a real grievance: he says the doctor’s father had him jailed as a vagrant, and the widow’s husband had him horsewhipped in front of the jail with the whole town watching. But the book almost never lets that history make him more than a monster; the one exception is the description of his death in Chapter 33. In the graveyard he says, “The Injun blood ain’t in me for nothing.” In Chapter 30, when Huck finally names Joe, the Welshman decides that the threat to cut the widow’s face makes sense now, because “white men don’t take that sort of revenge. But an Injun! That’s a different matter altogether.” The story treats his cruelty as something in his blood. After his death, the narrator mocks the townspeople who had signed a petition asking the governor to pardon Joe, calling them “weaklings.”

Critics have made the same point. Wikipedia’s article on the novel summarizes the criticism: the book gives a “caricature-like portrayal of Native Americans” through Injun Joe, who is evil for no larger reason, gets no chance at redemption, and becomes a tourist attraction after his death. It also cites the scholar Carter Revard, who argues that the novel’s adults blame Joe’s Indian blood for his evil.

A fair reading notices both things: Tom’s pity when he sees how Joe died, and the narrator’s mockery of anyone who felt sorry for him. Many stories of the era used Native American villains this way. That does not make it harmless.

Other period language

• The slur. The book uses a racial slur for Black people nine times, always in dialogue: in Tom and Huck’s casual talk, and once in Injun Joe’s rage at being whipped “like” an enslaved man. We counted it in the Project Gutenberg text and do not reprint it.
• Jim. In Chapter 2, a young Black boy named Jim hauls water for Aunt Polly’s household. He is a minor character, and the narrator describes him with the condescension of the time. (He is not the Jim of Huckleberry Finn.)
• Slavery offstage. Twain’s preface mentions “slaves in the West,” and St. Petersburg is in a slave state, but the novel almost never looks at slavery directly. In Chapter 28 Huck mentions Uncle Jake, a Black man whom Huck describes as belonging to Ben Rogers’s father, who shares food with him; Huck says, “He likes me, becuz I don’t ever act as if I was above him.” The sequel puts slavery at the center.
• Playing “Indian.” On the island the boys play at Indians, splitting into “three hostile tribes” that ambush and scalp each other “by thousands.” Ask what that game says about how the town saw Native people.

Talking about it in class: describe what the text does, quote it accurately, and avoid repeating slurs aloud unless your teacher has set clear ground rules. Think about who is speaking: a character, the narrator, or Twain looking back.

Tom Sawyer ends with Huck living at the Widow Douglas’s, his share of the gold in the bank. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn picks up right there, and Huck narrates it himself: “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.”

The two books make a useful pair. In Tom Sawyer, a narrator looks back fondly on a boy’s adventures. In Huckleberry Finn, Huck tells his own story, and slavery, which Tom Sawyer mostly leaves offstage, becomes the center of the book. Tom returns near the end of the sequel, still playing by the rules of his adventure books.

Go to our Huckleberry Finn unit →

• Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Project Gutenberg eBook #74 (gutenberg.org/ebooks/74). All quotations on this page, the chapter count and the word counts come from this text. Chapter summaries are our own paraphrases.
• Wikipedia, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (June and December 1876 editions, True Williams’s illustrations, the Hannibal setting, criticism of the portrayal of Injun Joe, Carter Revard).
• Wikipedia, “List of Tom Sawyer characters” (Becky Thatcher and Laura Hawkins).
• Wikipedia, “Hannibal, Missouri” and “Mark Twain Cave” (Clemens’s boyhood town and the cave that inspired the novel’s).
• Wikipedia, “Mark Twain” (born 1835; moved to Hannibal at four; left at 18).
• Art: the raft and fence illustrations and the preview image are original artwork made for Jugami. They are not True Williams’s illustrations.