Tom Sawyer Flaws

The Flaws Of Human Nature

“It is human nature to think wisely and act foolishly,” says Anatole France, French poet, journalist, and successful novelist. Most of the time, we all have a plan to do something successfully, but at the end our nature as humans gets the best of our intentions. We have the capability to love and have compassion, but we also have the capacity for greed and cruelty. We have to ability to trick for our own benefit. One of the themes that Mark Twain explores in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is that human nature is easily manipulated. Three examples that support this theme are Tom tricking the boys in his neighborhood into whitewashing the fence, Aunt Polly getting tricked into buying things from magazines, and Tom and

Tom uses reverse psychology to trick other boys into doing his work for him. Tom talked Billy into whitewashing the fence by saying, “ ‘Does a boy get to whitewash a fence every day?’ That put the thing into new light… ‘Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little’ … ‘Tom gave up the brush with with alacrity in his heart’... There was no lack of material; boys happened along every little while; they came to jeer, but remained to whitewash” (19). This passage shows that the basics of human nature can be easily manipulated, as Tom convinced boys to paint his fence and give him free things. Many times in the novel, Tom figured out clever ways to get other people to do his work. Twain said that a law of human nature had been discovered. In order to make a man desire something, you need to make it hard to attain. Now, Mark Twain’s principal is called reverse phycology. It is used in our world in the marketing business. When marketers want to sell a product quickly, they put it on sale and offer a discount, off of inflated prices. Customers believe they are receiving a good deal, but in reality, the marketer is making greater profit per product! All in all, Twain shows how easily human nature can be exploited during this scene in the