Tom Sawyer Essay

Danger!!!

An essay on danger in Tom Sawyer


In chapter nine in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tom sneaks out of bed to meet his friend Huck in a grave yard. They do this to remove warts by swinging a dead cat above their head and saying an incantation. It reminded me of how superstitious kids can be. Although this is romantic in my mind, they are unaware of the imminent dangers lurking in the graveyard. I feel the book would be very boring and unrealistic if nothing bad ever happened. To make it more interesting, Tom and Huck encounter some dangers along the course of the story.

The first real danger they come upon is that night in the graveyard. They find Muff Potter, Injun Joe, and Doc. Robinson grave robbing. They proceed to rob the grave, Huck and Tom watching from their hiding place behind the trees. Injun Joe takes Muff Potter’s knife, and kills Doc. Robinson. The two boys are bewildered, and run as fast as they can from the scene. This enhanced the story’s plot, now adding a sub-theme to the story, and a secret Tom and Huck have to deal with.

The story pretty much returns to romance after that, but more bad things happen. The other one that comes to mind is the part when Becky and Tom get lost in the cave. The two venture into a cave as part of a picnic, but soon stray from the pack. They eventually find themselves lost, with very little food. They are hungry and almost out of candles. It says in the book that Tom thinks they have been lost for days and days, and even though it may have not been that long, they are after all stuck in a cave, which is very bad. They are “raging with hunger,” as it says in the book. Eventually they find their way out, and all’s well again. The cave is another part in which Tom encounters danger.

The story as a whole is romance, but there are many times in which bad things happen to steepen the plot. These two are probably the worst of them, and almost feel out of place in a romance book. It seems to me, though, that the book has bad parts that make it more realistic and more like comedy. As a whole, nothing serious happens to Tom, so the book is still romance, along with some bad things. They make the book more interesting, and definitely more fun to read.