Tom Sawyer

Mark Twain makes it a point for us to realize that kids, not unlike adults, are constantly “showing off”. No matter how high or low you may be in society people are always trying to one up each other. Tom has been trying to win over Amy for months by “all sorts of absurd boyish ways…[such as] dangerous gymnastic performances” (pg 419).
I think this shows how Tom, and probably many of the other boys this age, can not easily express there feelings so the have to resort to “showing off” physically. When you think about this its almost like animals! Most of the times animals show off physically to attract a mate and out due other males in there society. Keeping this in mind, later in the text Twain describes a scene with many different kinds of people “showing off”. For example, the librarian ‘showed off’ running hither and thither with his arms full of books and making a deal of the splutter and fuss…the young lady teachers ‘showed off’ bending sweetly over pupils that were lately being boxed…the young gentlemen teachers ‘showed off’ with small scoldings and other little displays of authority…” (pg 434). The adults were showing off in much the same way that Tom did in the school yard trying to impress the little girl. This bridges the gap between adulthood and childhood. Twain makes us see that not only kids act this way, adults do to every day and probably unconsciously.

Also Twain steps out of the text at one point and tells us that “ in order to make a man or boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain” (pg 414-415). This creates an interesting point that can still be applied to life today. People are constantly working towards something better and bigger that they can not attain. Our world is so materialistic that we don’t realize we are always going to want more, more, more. Once we actually get what we were working for it is never as great as we thought it would be and it gets quickly replaced with another material that we work towards and it is a never ending cycle. On the other hand people who realize this use it to exploit and make a profit from others. For example, when Tom pretends to be having so much fun painting that fence he ends up getting a bunch of kids to do it for him and he doesn’t have to work at all!