Heroism In Huck's Injun Joe

Which proves to be as pathetic as it is unsettling. Tom and Huck’s foiling of Injun Joe serve as a way for them to reject his beastly nature, and their acts of heroism are meant to reject the town’s hypocritical nature. The very qualities they send away by banishing Joe are the same qualities the town’s people ascribed to the boys. From seeing this, it seems that the method in which Tom and Huck achieving greatness appears to be in their steadfast refusal to be like other people. In many ways, Tom’s half-brother Sid is his opposite. He presents an illusion of good behavior and kind heartedness to adults like his Aunt, when deep down he is mostly a vindictive child. With habits that include “glorying over Tom” (Twain, 13) during times where …show more content…
Less common (but still prominent) is the hero that acts as a silent guardian and watchful protector to the innocent (we saw an extant of this with Huck Finn). In Twain’s novel we see a kind of heroism that is predicated on one’s ability to go against the whims of human nature and human society to achieve something great, and this is only the case because both human nature and human society (which is not where Tom learned how to correctly carry on in life) is deeply flawed. Despite the fact that Tom is praised and venerated for his deeds, great lengths are gone to show that this praise doesn’t mean a thing. The townspeople aren’t a true authority on things with gravity to them, which certainly means they have no understanding of what true heroism is. We see through behavior that runs contrary to how Tom is presented that superficial “goodness” as defined by society is no indication of anything and that having qualities associated with “badness” doesn’t necessarily preclude one from being a goodhearted individual. Finally, it is in Tom’s ending synthesis of resourcefulness and responsibility that we see his potential as a figure of virtue and heroism. At the start of his adventures, the narrator states that Tom understands that “Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do”, and towards the end, the reader begins to understand through Tom’s actions that heroism consists of what one is obliged to do by no one but one’s self, through a lens of understanding concerned with what others may need. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Twain paints the portrait of a town filled with people lost in their own idiosyncrasies and hypocrisies, a monster enslaved by his darkest impulses, and a boy who finds a way to overcome all that by simply beinghimself. If Tom has taught us anything, it’s