Themes, Motifs, and Symbols in The Devil and Tom Walker
- One theme found in The Devil and Tom Walker is greed has consequences. When approached by the Devil, also know as "Old Scratch, Tom is offered great wealth and riches beyond his imagination. Immediately he accepts the offer and says he will do what ever it takes to get the riches, basically selling his soul to the devil. Even after moving to Boston, and becoming quite wealthy off of other peoples money, he still refuses to feed his horses and spend any money on anything but himself. Finally, at the end of the story, Tom says to a customer "The devil take me...if i have made a farthing!"(p22) which ends up getting him taken by the devil, and ending his life because he was so greedy and didn't even realize it. - Kendall Ward
- One symbol found in The Devil and Tom Walker is the Old Scratch(The Devil) symbolizes temptation in this book. When Tom Walker decides to take that shortcut through the swamp he meets a black man. This black man goes by the name of Old scratch, Tom Walker decided to listen to this man. "The black man told him of great sums of money buried by Kidd the pirate... All these were under his command, and protected by his power, so that none could find them but such as propitiated his favor."(pg 9) Through this quote you can tell that the Devil (Old scratch) is tempting Tom Walker to make a deal with him by bringing up the treasure he has in store for him if he follows a deal . -Jasmin Cisneros
- The want for wealth is a very important and dominant motif in The Devil and Tom Walker. Wealth is the source of every known character in the short story. There are no prominent "good" characters in the story, as each individual strives to achieve some better amount of wealth that they think will satisfy their insatiable desires.(which also leads them to becoming "evil" by the ways in which they gain wealth.) The desire of wealth led Tom Walker's wife to her gruesome and unavoidable murder. This murder did not affect Tom Walker emotionally to any degree, and in fact drove him to want wealth even more. Then Tom Walker's desire for wealth led him to sell his soul to the devil, which is one of the worst sins that could be possibly committed in his time. Later on, after Tom Walker had received his ill-gotten wealth, most of the citizens drove themselves to complete poverty from the desire of potential wealth from spontaneous business gain, which seldom to never happens/happened in real life and is explained in the following quote. Washington Irving writes, " In a word, the great speculating fever which breaks out every now and then in the country, had raged to an alarming degree, where everybody was dreaming of making sudden fortunes out of nothing" .(pg.18) So, the repetitive motif of wealth led to the conclusion of a moral, which is actually the basic theme and plot of this short story. The desire of wealth will always lead to greed, which inevitably ends in a life altering consequence. -Dakota Ransom