Tom Sawyer is a boy. He's mischievous, he's looking for adventures, he's fascinated by insects. However, while much has been written about these first two personality traits, it is the third, the uncharted territory of Tom's insectile interactions, that intrigues me. Throughout my reading of Tom Sawyer there was a prevalent ringing in my ears, a gnawing in my neck. It became clear to me that while the main characters in the novel might be Tom, Becky, and Huck, some of the key players in the story don't have any lines. Instead they have wings. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay In this article, I examine most of the instances where insects creep into Tom's story. Sometimes their presence can go unnoticed, but other times their sting lasts a long time. The small references to Tom's encounters with insects will be mentioned simply to establish that, in an example of art imitating life, insects are everywhere. But precisely the cases in which the symbolic message of the insect is impossible to ignore will be the ones we will discuss in more detail. Before we look at specific examples under the microscope, let's quickly try to eliminate all errors from the book. We will examine stellar insects with the precise eye of the entomologist: the fly and the cockroach in church, the squiggle in the field, the tick at school and Tom's equation between man and insect. But before we do that, we must first note the minor bugs, the cameos so to speak. You may only remember one or two instances where an insect plays a role in the book, but as the saying goes, for every cockroach you see, there are a dozen more behind the walls. There is the ventriloquist cricket in chapter nine that "no human ingenuity could detect" (65). Later on the same page, Tom hears the ticking of the Deathwatch, a type of cockroach which, according to superstition, meant that "someone's days were numbered". There's the bug on Jackson's Island that pretends to be dead when Tom hits it. Here we also meet the ants who struggle to carry away a spider five times bigger than them. We can't even forget the ladybug to whom Tom commands "Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home, your house is on fire, your children are alone" (96). Again, while insights could be drawn into the individual appearance of all these insects, at the risk of being repetitive and quite possibly annoying you (sorry, I couldn't resist), I will focus on the specific cases mentioned above, starting with the fly and the cockroach in church. This scene is one of the first instances where we see Tom interact with an insect. During the minister's endless prayer, Tom is greeted at his pew by a common housefly. The intricate, if not intimate, description given to the fly is more reminiscent of a voyeur describing his hidden lover than a supposed praying Tom profiling a winged guest. bench before him and tortured his spirit by quietly rubbing his hands, embracing his head with his arms and polishing it so vigorously that it seemed almost to separate from the body, and the thin thread of a neck was exposed for display; scratching his wings with his hind legs and smoothing them to his body as if they had been the tails of his dress, going through his entire toilet with the same tranquility as if he knew he was perfectly safe (40). It is a telling comment that the house fly, one of the simplest of all creatures, is more intriguing to Tom than a discussion with the Creator himself about ongoing prayer. This is just the beginning of Twain's intentional undermining of the Christian Church, and not the last time he will usean insect as his messenger. Moments after the fly leaves, another insect serves as a distraction from Tom's sermon. He remembers that he has a "treasure" in his possession as he has a bug. After its removal, the beetle immediately lives up to its name. The resulting pinch causes Tom to throw him into the hallway. While with the fly before, only Tom seemed to enjoy the distraction from prayer that it provided, in this case we see that several people "uninterested in the sermon, found relief in the beetle" (41). With this, Twain further mocks the church. Not only was the boy bored by the tedious procedure, but so was much of the congregation. Again, even something as low as an insect is more interesting than the apparent height of God's message. Furthermore, the dichotomy between serious and playful, or moral and mischievous, that these interactions establish, parallels Tom's prevailing struggle between his need for adventure and his desire to be good to Aunt Polly. Twain uses a doodle to further demystify the concept of Church. After his superstition regarding his lost marbles fails to produce the expected result, "the whole structure of Tom's faith was shaken to its foundations." To satisfy his shaken faith, Tom falls to his knees, not to pray, but to ask for the prophetic advice of an insect. “Doodlebug, doodlebug, tell me what I want to know,” Tom sings as his mouth is close to the ground. Then suddenly, "the sand began to work, and immediately a small black insect appeared for a second and then darted underneath again in fright." To Tom's delight, his questions were answered. "He didn't say it! So a witch did it. I just knew it" (62, all quotation marks). The squiggle tells us more than just the fact that the failure of Tom's superstition was due to a witch's curse. Before asking him for advice, Tom doesn't say what the squiggle should do if a witch is responsible. It is simply when he does something, presumably anything, that his faith is renewed. Twain is mocking the actions of Christians who say, “Oh Lord, please give me a sign,” and then when a drop of rain falls or a dog barks, they are certain that God has spoken. Likewise, Tom's interpretation of the doodlebug's message shows us that you can find what you want if you search hard enough. Tom says, “Doodlebug, Doodlebug, tell me what I want to know,” not “tell me what you know.” It is obvious that he has already decided to settle anyway. In this sense, Twain connects the superstition of boys throughout history to Christianity as a whole. Both become ridiculous when they are reduced symbolically, and literally, to a boy on his knees asking an insect to reveal divine truth to him. This technique of questioning Christianity by reducing its traditions to childish games is later used by Twain in Huck Finn. It seems childish when at the beginning of that book the kids make their life choices based on the writings of Robin Hood and other adventure books. However, when confronted with the reality that adults do the same thing every day with the writings of the Bible, the reader feels a little uncomfortable. In Tom Sawyer, putting hope in prayer is like living your life according to the Bible, the squiggle is Robin Hood. Another key encounter with the insects occurs when Tom and Joe choreograph the tick's actions while at school. Tom usually finds himself bored in class because he feels it stifles his adventures. Taking insects as a metaphor, Tom says that "the sleepy murmur of the twenty-five studying scholars calmed the soul like the enchantment that is in the murmur of bees" (54). To relieve.