Chapter 9: The Graveyard

In the book, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, I found that Chapter 9 was a very significant chapter in the book.  In addition to helping create a personal connection to the book by helping me understand what life would have been like during the time of Tom and Huck’s adventures, it’s in this chapter that the relationship between Huck and Tom really begins to develop.

            There are several significant things in this chapter that helped me understand what life was like back in Mark Twain’s time. First, Tom and Huck visit a graveyard in an attempt to remove warts with a dead cat. While this seems silly, it seems to have been something fairly normal for the characters and it shows how far a couple of boys would go to solve a problem back then.  In this section, they decided to try out Huckleberry Finn’s suggestion to use a dead cat. But where are you supposed to find one of those? In the novel, Huck just shows up with a dead cat, like it’s no big deal. It would have been interesting to know just where he had gotten the cat.  Besides the cat, it seems that it was much easier to “sneak out” in those days. In the chapter, Tom sneaks out around ten at night. How did he do that? I usually go to bed around nine, and my parents don’t go to bed until several hours later, so my chances would be pretty slim of sneaking out at ten.  I also found it very interesting that a bunch of grave robbers could just wander into a graveyard and dig up a grave to steal a person’s valuable possessions.  I can’t imagine anyone robbing a grave these days, even if the graveyard didn’t have a fence around it.  It would just be outright disrespectful to the person’s family, and you would never be able to forgive yourself for disrupting someone’s grave.  I also don’t think people are buried with that many valuable things these days. People must have had a lot of valuable things buried with them in the grave back then to make it worth the while of the grave robbers.  I guess these things show how things change over time.  In a hundred years or so kids are going to look back at our time and say things like, “Wow! I can’t imagine life being like that.” Or maybe something like, “Wow! I can’t imagine what it would be like if we didn’t have hovercrafts!”  It just goes to show that things are always changing, and to Tom Sawyer, our way of life would seem pretty weird too.

           

            More important than the personal connection, this chapter was also significant for the development of the characters.  The chapter highlights Tom and Huck’s first big experience together.  Without the graveyard, there would have been no piracy or treasure hunting and the book would have ended much differently.  In the end, Tom and Huck end up splitting the treasure money, and Huck ends up being taken care of by the Widow Douglas. None of that would have happened if it weren’t for Tom and Huck’s graveyard experience in chapter nine.

Therefore, I conclude that chapter nine was definitely one of the most important chapters, if not the most important chapter, of the book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.