The Monkey's Paw: Summary & Analysis

Beginning

The story's opening is cozy and domestic: a chess game, a fire, a stormy night outside. This homey atmosphere — warmth, family, a friend visiting — is deliberately constructed to make the intrusion of the paw more alarming. Morris arrives with tales of India and eventually produces the talisman. His reluctance, his warning, the way he throws it into the fire and must be stopped from leaving it there — all of these signal that this is not a curiosity but a genuine danger. Herbert's playful joking about the wish, and his suggestion of two hundred pounds, establishes him as the story's most vulnerable figure.

Rising action

The morning after the wish, the Whites wait — Herbert teasing that a dark stranger will arrive with the money, that the postman will bring a bag of gold. He leaves for work. A company man arrives that afternoon and beats around the subject carefully for some time before delivering the news: Herbert has been caught in the machinery. The company offers two hundred pounds in recognition, expressly without admitting any liability. Mrs. White does not understand immediately; when she does, the number lands on her like a physical blow. The precision of the amount — matching the wish exactly — is Jacobs's first demonstration of the paw's terrible literalism.

Climax

Ten days after the funeral, Mrs. White wakes her husband in the night. She has had a thought: there are still two wishes left. She insists he wish Herbert back. Mr. White is horrified — Herbert was in the machinery, has been buried for ten days — but Mrs. White does not hear his hesitation. He makes the wish. For a long time nothing happens. Then, from far down the road, they hear footsteps approaching. A knock at the door. Mrs. White runs to answer; Mr. White fumbles for the paw in the dark. The knocking grows louder, frantic. He makes the third wish at the last moment. The knocking stops. The street outside the door is empty.

Ending

The story ends with the door open, the street empty, and Mrs. White's wail the only sound. The reader never knows what was returned or what the third wish dismissed. Jacobs's genius is in leaving the horror entirely to the imagination — implied rather than shown. The Whites wished for money, got it at the cost of their son, wished their son back, and then had to unwish him before they had to face what came back. The paw's final silence is the most terrifying thing in the story. For another story where an unexpected visitor arrives at the door with irreversible consequences, see The Landlady.

Mr. White

Mr. White is the story's moral center: a decent man who makes a fatally careless decision. He retrieves the paw from the fire despite Morris's warning; he makes the first wish half-jokingly; he makes the second wish under his wife's pressure even though he understands what that wish might return. His final, desperate use of the third wish — stopping his wife from opening the door — requires him to give up his son a second time. He is the story's tragic figure, caught between love for his wife and terror at what she does not yet understand.

Mrs. White

Mrs. White's grief, after Herbert's death, is rendered with great sympathy. Her demand for the second wish is the action of a mother who cannot accept the finality of loss. She does not think through the implications — she only wants her son. The story does not condemn her for this. Her wail at the empty street at the end is genuinely devastating. She believed the paw could restore what was lost; she was right, technically. She simply did not consider what form the restoration would take.

Herbert

Herbert is the story's warmth and humor — the young man who jokes about dark strangers and bags of gold, who goes off to work one morning and does not come home. His absence is the story's engine: the Whites are decent people, neither greedy nor wicked, but their small wish unleashes a mechanism they cannot control. Herbert's death is not divine punishment; it is the paw's brutal literalism in action.

Sergeant Major Morris

Morris has had his three wishes. He will not say what they were, only that he would not use another. His reluctance — he destroys the paw by throwing it in the fire — is the story's clearest warning, and the Whites do not heed it. Morris functions as the character who has already lived the cautionary tale the story is about to tell.

The mechanics of fate

The fakir who enchanted the paw wanted to show that fate governs human life and that interference comes at terrible cost. The paw does not reward or punish — it fulfills. It gives exactly what is asked for, and the consequences emerge from the gap between what the wishers said and what they meant. Two hundred pounds: arrived, but from Herbert's death compensation. Herbert returned: yes, but in whatever state ten days of burial has produced. The paw is an engine of literal fulfillment in a world where people rarely mean exactly what they say.

Grief and the refusal of death

Mrs. White's demand for the second wish articulates a truth about grief: the refusal to accept that death is irreversible. Her wish is the narrative expression of a feeling almost every grieving person experiences — the compulsive desire to wish it undone. The story's horror lies in treating that wish as literally possible and then showing what literal possibility looks like. The knocking at the door is the most terrifying use of implication in English horror literature.

The domestic and the supernatural

Jacobs places the horror inside the coziest possible setting: a cottage, a fire, a chess game, an English family. The paw arrives through a familiar visitor. The company man who delivers the news of Herbert's death is ordinary, awkward, bureaucratic. The horror is never theatrical — it arrives through normal channels, at normal hours, in the language of insurance and compensation. This mundane framing makes it more disturbing, not less. Compare the way The Tell-Tale Heart generates terror from an ordinary domestic setting and the unbearable pressure of a guilty mind.