The Devil and Tom Walker

Habibat Oguntade
Ap English III
10/15/09
The Devil and Tom Walker
The Devil and Tom Walker is a story written by Washington Irving. The story is generally about an individual, who let is selfish and greedy personality take complete charge of him. Right from the beginning of the story, Tom has been seen as an unfortunate person and he remained unfortunate throughout. He had various terrible situations take over him, which depicts the Gothicism in the story. Irving displays a dark and gloomy tone throughout, with tells us that the idea of the whole story is nothing like Puritanism, as puritans are used to doing things based on the clean and pure aspects of life. With the use of his writing style, Irving construes how people let materialistic aspects of life sets them off track, and once they get addicted to it, they would anything to keep them in favor of materialism.
Irving constitutes the setting in such a way that readers will be able to understand that not all things that look beautiful are actually beautiful. He describes the environment as an area where no one had any interest in. It was simply a no-go area, which has been deserted a very long time ago. The use of vivid descriptions, give readers a clue of how the environment really was. “ One side of this inlet Is a beautiful dark grove”. In this quotes, the world beautiful spices up the whole sentence, but in this same sentence, Irving also uses to word dark. The word beautiful usually comes with other fascinating words, but in this case, the word beautiful is since as an objective to gild the dark part of the environment. Here, Irving creates a mysterious to, which gives readers a general understanding of what the story is all about.
One of the most important ideas of the story, is how it opposes the whole idea of Puritanism. Here, the protagonist of the story who allowed greed and selfishness to control him. As a result of this, he pledged both himself and his morals to the devil for the sake of riches and wealth. Tom’s selfish attitude can be noticed through Irvings description of Tom’s home. “He had a wife as miserly as himself; they were so miserly that they even conspired to cheat each other”. According to this quote, Tom and his wife are seen as egocentric individuals, because they should not have any reason to conspire against each other. Married couples should always be the best means of support to each other, but in their case, they served as obstacles that bring each other down. On the contrary, puritans will always remain as faithful as they can be. This one of the ways Irving uses to bring out an outstanding difference between Gothicism and Puritanism.
Most individuals are excessively materialistic, and do not care about the outcome of situations they might get themselves into. An example of this type of individuals is Tom Irving. Out of greed, Tom Walker compromised his soul to the devil in order to gain wealth, riches and fame. While creating for himself a good name, he squeezed the debtors until every penny dropped into his own account. Irving explains, “Tom was the universal friend to the needy, and acted like ‘a friend in need’; that is to say he always exacted good pay and security.” His greed for wealth caused him to cheat others out of money and keep it for himself.
When Tom began truly succeeding in his business as a broker, he became a man of rank in society, power and wealth at his use. The protagonist draws far too much love and attention to his money, though he no longer finds joy in riches. Tom wasted time on failed plans to taking debtor’s money and found that happiness does not come from material things.
It can further be concluded that good things sometimes contradicts themselves. With the use of his writing style, Irving construes how people let materialistic aspects of life sets them off track, and once they get addicted to it, they would anything to keep them in favor of materialism. In Tom’s case he wasn’t patient enough to find out how the step he was about to take can help him or hurt him. Unfortunately for him, the situation he got himself into the not only hurt him, but also deprived him of the ability to take a second chance, and turn for a new leave.