Did Tom Sawyer mature?

In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, our protagonist, Tom significantly matures into an adult over the course of the book. The reader, throughout this 230 page story, observes Tom develop from a reckless boy full of mischief, being “Full of the old Scratch”(Twain2), to a young man who understands the need to be a positive part of society. His actions throughout the book, tricking children to whitewash a fence for him, testifying against Injun Joe, and persuading Huck to stay with the Widow Douglas demonstrate this, and these particular examples are some of the larger turning points in the progression of his development from a child to an adult. From these events we see Tom retain a more insightful, compassionate, and obedient conscience.

Early in Tom’s adventures we see Tom’s punishment for playing hooky, administered by his Aunt Polly. Tom is tasked with whitewashing “Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high,”(Twain9) or 810 square feet per side. Tom, a cunning child, deceives other boys not only to whitewash the fence for him, but to pay him to do it as well. This doesn’t sound mature, and this event in and of itself isn’t. Although obscure, Mark Twain does hint that however inappropriate Tom’s behavior may be, “He discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it-namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain,”(Twain14-15). This was a very adult finding. This was a first step in Tom’s growth, because it indicated Tom had begun to have insight, in the way that he could predict children’s behaviors based on his own, a step toward empathy. Insight is essential to maturing because you must understand others and human nature as a whole to grow ...

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...rough his growing, and ever more sensitive conscience.

In Conclusion, when Twain writes: “So endeth this chronicle. It being strictly a history of a boy, it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man” (p. 225), Tom has definitely matured. Mark Twain ends his novel with a fitting end, with Tom beginning a “robber gang,” making it clear that Tom Sawyer is still a boy with juvenile schemes. However, Tom’s experiences throughout the murder of Dr. Robinson and to the death of Injun Joe leave him a different person. His insight, compassion, and obedience, are gained and emphasized through his trickery with the whitewashing, his choice to testify against Injun Joe, and his advice to Huck. Mark Twain leaves the reader of his outstanding book on the threshold between the end Tom’s boyhood and the beginning of his adulthood.