Universal Truth In Mark Twain's The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer

173 Words1 Pages
Mark Twain's excerpt from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a high-level comedy, uses a comic character and a comic situation to convey the universal truth that making something seem unattainable can make it more desirable. In the expert, Tom characterizes a lazy boy sneaky as an eel, that manages to get out of his work. Not only does Tom wittily get out of his work, but he is so clever he has his friends pay him because as he says “Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?” (SB pg. 269). At first, Tom tries to bribe Jim into doing the whitewash by offering “Jim, I’ll give you a marvel. I’ll give you a white alley!” (SB pg. 269). After that, Tom decided to manipulate his friends with the ludicrous idea that his chore was actually