Describe Tom Sawyer, as a person, listing some of his good and bad traits, using QUOTATIONS from the text. 2 Good & 2 Bad.

This quotation is from Chapter 1, when Tom has just escaped Aunt Polly’s grasp once again. Aunt Polly’s mixture of amusement and frustration at Tom’s antics is characteristic of her good humor. She attempts to discipline Tom out of a sense of duty more than out of any real indignation. In fact, she often seems to admire Tom’s cleverness and his vivacity. Her inner conflict about her treatment of Tom is summed up in the final sentence of this passage.

The faithful re-creation of regional dialects is a characteristic element of Twain’s style. Aunt Polly uses a colloquial vocabulary and pronunciation that may be difficult for a reader unfamiliar with these speech patterns. Twain’s minute attention to language is an important aspect of his realism—–his project of capturing the uniqueness of American frontier life. Twain carefully studied the speech of his local Missouri community and experimented with different ways of rendering it in writing. Furthermore, he attended closely to the internal variations in speech even within such a small town as Hannibal (rendered in his fiction as St. Petersburg). The differences between the language of rich people and poor people, and between the language of blacks and whites, often find expression in Twain’s dialogue. In addition to its distinctive idiom and accent, Aunt Polly’s speech is peppered with clichés and folk wisdom, mixing Scripture and local sayings in a way that gives structure and meaning to her experience

 I don’t know the answer exactly but this should help

Explanation: This interchange between Ben Rogers and Tom occurs during the whitewashing episode from Chapter 2. One of Tom’s earliest exploits in the novel, the whitewashing scam gives us a thorough initial look at Tom’s ingenious character. Most evident in this dialogue with Ben Rogers is Tom’s consummate skill as an actor and his instinctive understanding of human behavior. In these moments of prankish virtuosity, Tom always keeps one step ahead of his victims, anticipating their reactions and cornering them verbally into the response he desires. In painting these scenes, Twain draws on the American folk tradition of the trickster. (The Br’er Rabbit tales are another well-known example of this type of story.)

This episode also gives Twain a chance to advance the idea that certain values are as much a matter of convention as anything. The moral with which Twain concludes this amusing scene is, “Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and . . . [p]lay consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.” The arbitrariness of many conventions and the absurdity with which people desire things just because they are forbidden are facts of life that Twain scrutinizes again and again in the novel.

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