Devious Tom


In the short story of “The Glorious Whitewasher” Samuel Clemens, otherwise known as Mark Twain, creates a mischievous main character named Tom. Tom’s standing with his paintbrush and whitewash. He knows Aunt Polly’s carefully watching him, but he can’t bare standing in the hot weather and painting instead of hanging out with his friends. Tom bribes everyone around him while he only thinks about himself.
Tom is a troublemaker and he is also very devious. It starts out as a regular sunny day, the first point in the mode of comedy. Aunt Polly needs Tom to paint the fence, so Tom says he will do it. But, knowing Tom, he will find his way out. The second point to the mode of comedy is conflict- when Tom doesn’t want to whitewash the fence.
Since Tom doesn’t want to paint the fence, he bribes his friends into doing it for him. Marvels are used as a symbol in this story. They symbolize bribery, because Tom gives the big marvels to his friend in order to get him to paint the fence. Before you know it, Tom ends up with all the marvels, because people start paying him to paint the fence. All of the toys he ended up with were like all the money in the world to Tom.
While Tom’s friends pay him to paint the fence, he has nothing to do except for play with all of the gifts he received. It all returns to normal when Tom runs out of whitewash and his friends can’t paint anymore- the last point in the mode of comedy. You can see that in society today a lot of people use others for their own good. Just think, wouldn’t you want to earn everything you have by working for it and knowing that you did everything you could to get it, instead of having it handed to you?