The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

“Old fools is the biggest fools there is. Can’t learn an old dog new tricks, as the saying is. But my goodness, he never plays them alike, two days, and how is a body to know what’s coming?”

Aunt Polly is irritated and bemused when Tom tricks her and escapes. She admires Tom’s commitment to inconsistency and erratic behavior. She can never prepare for him because he has an endless supply of tricks—unlike her, which she thinks is befitting a person of her age.

“He was not the Model Boy of the village. He knew the model boy very well though—and loathed him.”

The Model Boy is Willie Mufferson, a do-gooder whom all the boys in town hate. Willie is so good that he makes them look even worse. Willie is always well-dressed, considerate, and clean, and he represents everything that Tom and his friends resist. Tom loathes the boy that every parent in St. Petersburg hopes their sons will emulate.

“He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.”

Tom learns a lesson about human nature and the power of incentives. Manufactured scarcity is what lets him collect treasures from the other boys while they do his whitewashing. Using reverse psychology, Tom pretends that whitewashing is a joy because it is a rare task. He has only to plant the idea that the others are missing out on a privilege to get them to do his work for him.