Tom Sawyer is a boy. He is mischievous, he is looking for adventure and he is fascinated by insects. Yet while much has been written about these first two personality traits, it's the third, the unexplored territory of Tom's insect interactions, that intrigues me. Throughout my reading of Tom Sawyer, there was a widespread ringing in my ear and a twinge in my neck. It became apparent to me that although the main characters in the novel are Tom, Becky, and Huck, some of the key players in the story have no speaking lines. Instead, they have wings. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay In this article, I look at most of the instances where insects find their way into Tom's story. Sometimes their presence can go unnoticed, but in other cases their bite lasts a long time. The small references to Tom's insect encounters will be mentioned simply to establish that, in an example of art imitating life, insects are everywhere. However, it is the cases where the symbolic message of the insect is impossible to ignore that we will discuss in the greatest detail. Before putting specific examples under the microscope, let's quickly try to get all the bugs out of the book. We will examine with the precise eye of an entomologist the star insects: the fly and the beetle at church, the doodlebug in the fields, the tick at school and Tom's equation between man and insect. But before we do that, we must first note the minor cameo bugs 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 of chapter nine that “no human ingenuity could locate” (65). Later on this same page, Tom hears the ticking of a death watch, a type of beetle that, according to superstition, meant that "one's days were numbered." There's the tumblebug on Jackson Island who plays dead when Tom pushes him. Here we also encounter ants struggling to carry away a spider five times their size. Nor can we forget the ladybug to whom Tom commands “Ladybug, ladybug, fly away, your house is on fire, that of your children alone” (96). Again, while information could be gleaned from the individual appearances of all of these insects, at the risk of being repetitive, and most likely disturbing you (sorry, couldn't resist), I will focus on the specific cases mentioned previously, starting with the fly and the beetle in church. This scene is one of the first instances where we see Tom interact with an insect. During the minister's bottomless prayer, Tom is greeted in his pew by a common housefly. The complex, if not intimate, description that the fly is given is more reminiscent of a voyeur describing his hidden lover than a supposed praying Tom describing a winged guest. In the middle of the prayer a fly had lit up on the back of the bench in front of him and tortured his mind by calmly rubbing his hands, kissing his head with his arms and polishing it so vigorously that he almost seemed to be separate from the body, and the thin thread of a neck was exposed to see; scraping his wings with his hind legs and smoothing them over his body as if they were ponytails, going through his entire grooming as calmly as if he knew he was perfectly safe (40). It is a significant comment that the housefly, one of the simplest of all creatures, is more intriguing to Tom than a discussion with theCreator himself on the prayer that takes place. This is only the beginning of Twain's intentional attack on the Christian Church, and it is not the last time he uses an insect as a messenger. Moments after the fly leaves, another insect acts as a distraction from Tom's sermon. He remembers that he has a “treasure” in his possession in that he has a thumbtack. Upon removal, the beetle immediately lives up to its name. The ensuing pinch causes Tom to throw him into the alley. Whereas with the fly before, only Tom seemed to enjoy the distraction of prayer it provided, in this case we see that several people "not interested in the sermon, found relief with the beetle" (41). With this, Twain mocks the church even more. Not only was one boy bored by these tedious procedures, but a good portion of the congregation was bored as well. Again, even something as low as an insect is more interesting than the apparent height of God's message. Moreover, the dichotomy between the serious and the playful, or the moral and the mischievous, that these interactions establish parallels Tom's widespread struggle between the need for adventure and his desire to be good to Aunt Polly . Twain uses a doodlebug to further demystify the Church. After his superstition regarding his lost marbles failed to produce the desired result, "Tom's entire structure of faith was shaken to its foundations." To satisfy his shaken faith, Tom falls to his knees, not to pray, but to seek the prophetic advice of an insect. “Doodlebug, doodlebug, tell me what I want to know,” Tom sings as his mouth is near the ground. Then, suddenly, "the sand began to work, and soon a small black insect appeared for a second, then scurried away again, frightened." To Tom's delight, his questions were answered. "He didn't say it! So it was a witch who did it. I just knew it" (62, all quotes). The doodlebug tells us more than just that Tom's failed superstition was due to a witch's curse. Before asking for advice, Tom doesn't say what the doodlebug is supposed to do if a witch is responsible for it. It is simply when he does something, probably anything, that his faith is renewed. Twain mocks the actions of Christians who say, “Oh Lord, please give me a sign,” and 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 look hard enough. Tom says, “Doodlebug, doodlebug, tell me what I want to know,” not “tell me what you know.” It's obvious that he's already determined to be satisfied one way or another. In this sense, Twain connects the superstition of children 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. This technique of questioning Christianity by reducing its traditions to childish games would later be used by Twain in Huck Finn. It seems childish when at the beginning of this book the boys make their life choices based on the writings of Robin Hood and other adventure books. Yet, faced with the fact that adults do the same thing every day with the writings of the Bible, the reader becomes a little worried. In Tom Sawyer, placing hope in prayer is like living life according to the Bible, the doodlebug is Robin Hood. Another key encounter with insects is when Tom and Joe choreograph the tick's actions at school. Tom is bored.