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.