How To Eat Fried Worms

A nervous worrier who tends to chew on his thumb, Alan bets that Billy can’t eat 15 worms in 15 days. When Billy seems up to the challenge, Alan realizes he’s gotten himself into deep financial trouble, so he and his friend Joe resort to lies, tricks, and cheating to derail Billy. Throughout the story, Alan serves as the antagonist and moral foil to Billy. Where Billy is a quiet, humble thinker, Alan is impulsive and loud-mouthed. While he stands in contrast to the protagonist, Alan remains relateable, and readers can see their own flaws reflected in Alan’s.

As Billy nears victory, Alan becomes frenzied with anxiety and tries to physically stop Billy from finishing the worm challenge, putting his old friend in danger. In this way, the reader comes to understand the lengths some people will go to in order to avoid losing. It’s a valuable lesson, not only on the dangers it poses to the almost-winner, but also the dangers it poses to the moral compass of the loser.

After he loses, Alan must work off his debt, but he rises to the challenge and manages to remain friends with the others, including Billy. Although Alan is a sore loser throughout the book, he matures and accepts his fate—and also learns the value of a dollar.

Alan represents the doubts and anxieties that tug at anyone who dares to do unusual things. His attempts to derail Billy symbolize an adventurer’s deepest fears, that they will fail, whether by their own hand or that of circumstance. 

Tom agrees to be Billy’s assistant in the bet, and he works hard to keep Billy eating those worms. He also defends Billy against tricks and ruses launched by Alan and Joe, and he backs Billy in a fistfight that breaks out late in the worm challenge.

While Tom, in many ways, represents an ideal best friend—loyal, supportive, kind—he is also imperfect, and his flaws cause friction in their relationship. He gets a little pushy with Billy about eating the worms, and Tom runs away when Billy challenges him to eat a worm. This divides the two boys, allowing Billy to develop his independence and Tom to learn a lesson about boundaries.

Tom gets back in his friend’s good graces when Billy needs his confirmation regarding Alan and Joe’s latest ploy with the ninth worm. Tom continues to serve as Billy’s assistant and support system throughout the remainder of the novel, proving that friendship and camraderie are thicker than feuds.

In an adventure, there’s usually an advisor, and Tom takes that role in the story. Although Billy learns to stand up for himself, there are certain tasks he couldn’t accomplish without the help of Tom. His success is a collaborative effort and depends on Tom’s wits and ploys. 

The smartest and most educated of the boys, Joe takes Alan’s side and works hard to think up every ruse, trick, and ploy that might knock Billy from his worm-eating path. He’s very good at arguing, lawyer-style, in favor of whatever point he needs to make. Some of his schemes, like the plot to overfeed Billy at a ball game so he’ll fall asleep and forget to eat a worm, display a certain genius. His forgery of a letter from Billy’s doctor, warning the boy to stay away from the supposed dangers of worm-eating, goes a bit too far, but it shows his grasp of complex ideas and his knack for whipping up believable falsehoods that only a smart adult would find suspicious. Through his thoughts and actions, Joe propels the narrative and conflicts forward. Although Alan serves as the primary antagonist, it’s Joe who paves the path for Alan’s actions.

Joe also faces a moral reckoning for his actions. He begins to see that his efforts on Alan’s behalf have gotten out of hand, and he tries, without much success, to calm his increasingly anxious and desperate friend. As the voice of astute malice, then reason, Joe steers the actions of his friends and the narrative.

Joe symbolizes all the tricks and traps that the mind will come up with when it wants to stop a person from moving forward on an uncertain mission.

Billy’s mom is both a typical and atypical maternal figure. She predictably worries when she hears about Billy’s worm-eating challenge, especially when Billy wakes her in the middle of the night to complain about stomach pains. After she learns worms are harmless, however, she is an ally to Billy. She helps him prepare new and interesting ways to eat the critters, which, despite Alan and Joe’s prediction otherwise, isn’t exactly fair. She is willing to help her son, even if it means bending the rules.

Clearly a loving and caring mother, her presence helps create the sense that Billy has a stable household and folks who will protect him in a crisis. Her love and support give him a foundation on which to complete his mission.

Billy’s father is a smart, good-natured dad with a cheerful sense of humor who sees through the boys’ games and can reassure his son that eating worms won’t hurt him. He serves as the sensible anchor to the often unsensible hijinks of the other characters, reassuring his wife that Billy will be fine and pointing out to Billy when his friends try to trick him with a forged letter.

He finds Billy’s worm adventure amusing. He’s happy to take part in the project to the point of searching a cookbook for worm recipes. However, his position shifts when the challenge goes too far and puts Billy in danger, at which point he lays down the law. Once again, he functions as the voice of reason. He and Billy’s mother together establish the feeling of a well-grounded family watched over by wise and loving parents.

Alan lives in terror that his father will be furious when he finds out how much money the boy has lost from his savings account on a silly bet. In this way, Mr. Phelps, or a fear of him, is another main motivator of the plot, causing Alan to attempt a variety of ploys to derail Billy.

Mr. Phelps, though, seems level-headed, especially when he sits the boys down and encourages them to work out their differences after a fight. Any father who offers to reward the boys’ truce with ice cream afterward can’t be all bad, and Alan’s fears may be overblown. When Tom, Pete, and Billy wake up the neighborhood after Alan’s latest attempt to cheat Billy from eating a worm, Mr. Phelps makes his son apologize to the neighbors, but this, too, seems like a fair decision.

In the end, Alan also must work off the debt, just as he feared, but it turns out not to be as bad as he imagined, and he clears the debt by working at a store. Mr. Phelps is a better father than his son fears. He symbolizes the justice handed out by society when people get carried away and begin to cheat each other.