A Fence

Response To- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

A Saturday morning is meant to let you live, to let you breathe, to let you subsist and wander into your thoughts your world, not to whitewash a fence. With the sun shining down, and your friends coming out, expecting a new escapade to happen with you, not to have you whitewash a fence. For Tom Sawyer in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, his punishment seemed loathsome, to take away his one day of freedom, the most important thing in his life at that time. Although the next Saturday all would be forgotten except that he would have a new entity to trade, to get something fresh to surpass his old fondness.

This fence, the boards of Saturdays will get covered up and forgotten by painting over it, until it chips away and you can see the faint glimpse of preceding happenings and memories. A fence will once be new, as it soon gets old. It will have a backside, along with its good side facing out towards the world. It will get knocked down, get dirty, and have some weak boards, conversely it can get cleaned, it can get rebuilt back up and it will have strong boards that holds it together. It will have a gate that opens as well as closes, and it will need a coat of whitewash occasionally.

Whitewashing a fence, could mean to just gloss over, to just cover up, to just disguise, and become something that its not; a new clean fence. The idea of whitewashing something can be seen throughout the whole book if you really just look at that. The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer starts out with Tom eating the jam in the closet and making a mess all over his face, which would be the stained fence of this scene. To whitewash this fence, and to get out of trouble he says, “My Aunt look behind you!” To complete the new clean fence and to dry it off, she starts laughing as he absconds the episode again. As well when they run off to go pirating, their return was just looked over, as a happy event. It was an ecstatic experience that they all “came back from the dead” but really none of it would have happened if they didn’t go off pirating or would have just told someone. Everyone always says just tell us where your going and you can go, but that’s not true. If they did tell someone they wanted to go and try pirating, try living a life with no regrets, they would have been forbidden to go. You cant win this fight in the real world but it’s the world of minds eye so they did win the fight victoriously.


True, what is a white fence outside for, if you don’t expect it to get dirty. The whole book was like a big white fence. It was so easy to imagine what will happen next, and that everything will go back bleach white, and nothing would show up on it. There would be no mark left to show that it happened, because it all happened for no point except to enjoy. There was only one incident in the whole book that didn’t fit. At the beginning tom was getting scolded to not take sugar, the sugar bowl then fell and crashed to the floor, but not because of Tom, but because of Sid. Aunt Polly was very bias, along with that maybe sometimes it isn’t how it always has been before. Sometimes the side fence needs a coat too, not just the front.


Another point might be to go around to the other side of the fence and see what is there. People negatively looked upon Tom, Huck, Jim and Joe, and it was ambiguous to everyone, that they actually were good people. The community excluded them. One board on the fence can’t be eccentric while the rest are ordinary. When one of the communities boards collapses, a hole is left and the lost board was evoked, and honored, because while it was standing it wasn’t revered enough for blocking the winds, and the rains from damaging the heart.


The reasons to whitewash a fence; to try to erase some marks, to have it look good for the world to see, or maybe to use your Saturday morning. Tom just did things not really for a purpose that’s why his reason to whitewash a fence was to use your Saturday morning. Aunt Polly’s reason to get the fence whitewashed was for all the other reasons. She wanted it to look good, to try to erase marks, to try to forget what happened, to cover up the past. She doesn’t want to take responsibility for yesterdays happenings so she tries to cover it up. If she did take responsibility for yesterday Tom would be a perfect child, and nothing would go wrong. But sometimes, you have to forget to move on. They moved on after his mother’s death. That would probably be a big tough stain to get out, but after three coats of other peoples work, and all the “treasures” Tom could want, it seems to fade. It was only motioned once so it may have had lots of rains in between to lighten it up. So it can be good to get a new coat, and gloss over, cover up, disguise, and be something that you aren’t, but you’ll always go back to at least a cloudy fence in the end.

Listen To Your Heart!

response to The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer

The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer has a lot of ideas that all are basically about the same thing. Tom shows hope for everyone else in the way that you can live by listening to your heart not your head. It helps that plays the part of the adventurous, troublesome brother pretty well, although he also took on different roles, like the hero and lover. Tom’s life has a little too much of the perfect balance though. Connected to this is also that people have the ability to, and do change.


Sometimes things don’t equal out, sometimes things don’t make sense within themselves, and sometimes people can just get out of doing things a lot. Everything is always changing, so that changes us. In Tom’s case if he tried to be good, everyone would always remember in the back of his or her head how he used to be. The scene where Sid broke the sugar bowl and then Tom got lashed for it is a really good example of how you cant really expect what someone is going to do next. A person can do whatever he/she wishes when they listen to their heart, but their head is what messes them up. Everything can be almost perfect when this is true.

You cant be both the perfect little angle son and the perfect adventurous friend, but you can try out different takes on both of these roles. When they saw the doctor get murdered there isn’t a way to keep everyone happy, and it was too confusing for them then to do anything so they didn’t they just let it be. When they figured out what was going on he explained it and everything went back, kind of, to how it was. You cant make the doctor come back from the dead because that already happened, but they were able to change Muff Potter’s life. Usually you don’t have that much of an impact on someone, as saving their life, but you usually have some on someone’s.

The only downfall of listening to your heart not your head is that you wont remember anything and you’ll do the same thing over and over again. His whole life is a game. He doesn’t take anything seriously. His Aunt Polly talks a little bit about his mother, and he just forgets her. What he says even if he doesn’t try to be funny, is just silly. For instance he said to Huck “Any time you see something in the night, just skip around and meow.” p 200. In the end though he did change and he changed Huck too. They had a reason to try to be good, and they were. They got something out of it, because Tom and Huck wanted most, at the time, to be robbers. Aunt Polly's hoped that Tom would try to be good and he showed that he had hope in that aspect of his life too.