The Bottle Imp by Robert Louis Stevenson
Quick answer: The Bottle Imp by Robert Louis Stevenson, summary and analysis: Keawe's cursed bargain, the rule of selling for less, Kokua's sacrifice and the ending explained.
The bottle grants its owner anything: houses, fortunes, health. The terms are equally simple: if you die owning it, you burn in hell forever, and you can only be rid of it by selling it for less than you paid. Every sale lowers the price. Somewhere at the bottom of the arithmetic waits a buyer who can never sell, and Stevenson's story is the study of who volunteers, and why.
Stevenson wrote The Bottle Imp in Samoa; it appeared serially in 1891, notably in a Samoan translation that made it, by some accounts, the first fiction published in that language, and joined Island Nights' Entertainments in 1893. Set among Hawaiians rather than colonial visitors, it takes an old German folk motif and gives it the cleanest logical trap in fantasy fiction, plus something rarer in the genre: a love story that solves it.
The story in brief
Keawe, a poor Hawaiian sailor visiting San Francisco, is sold the bottle by a rich, sad old man for fifty dollars. The imp inside grants wishes, but the seller explains the covenant: die with it and be damned; sell it only at a loss; and the bottle returns to any owner who tries to cheat, dump or destroy it. Lucifer, legend says, brought it first to earth, and Prester John and Napoleon owned it on its long way down from millions to dollars. Keawe tests it, wishes modestly, and receives his heart's desire crooked: his uncle and cousin die, leaving him the money that builds his beautiful house, the Bright House, above Kona. He sells the bottle on to his friend Lopaka, who wants a schooner, and lives, briefly, as the happiest man alive.
Then Keawe meets Kokua and, on the night of their betrothal, discovers the mark of leprosy on his skin, which means exile to Molokai and the end of everything. He tracks the bottle down through a chain of owners to a man who paid two cents. Keawe buys it for one, curing himself but taking the final rung: one cent cannot be undersold, or so he believes, and his despair poisons the marriage until Kokua, learning the truth, finds the exit: other countries use smaller coins. In Tahiti, with French centimes worth a fifth of a cent, they try to sell, and are shunned as sorcerers. So Kokua secretly buys the bottle from her husband through a hired old man, paying four centimes for his three, damning herself to save him. Keawe, discovering her sacrifice, resolves to win it back the same way, and fortune sends him a brutal, drunken boatswain who buys it for two centimes, then refuses to sell it back: if he is going to hell anyway, he reasons, it will not be sober, and the bottle's rum is cheap. The boatswain swaggers off with the curse; Keawe runs to Kokua, and the two go home to the Bright House to live in great peace.
The characters
A fable's cast: each figure is one answer to the bottle's question.
Themes and meaning
Name the obvious themes first: the price of desire, salvation through self-sacrifice, and the fable's economics, in which every gain books its cost somewhere, from the uncle's death that funds the Bright House to the falling price that concentrates damnation on the last buyer. Love proves the only force in the story that willingly buys the loss, first Kokua for Keawe, then Keawe attempting it for her, and Stevenson lets mutual sacrifice, not cleverness, break the spell for them.
The sharper reading looks at the ending's disquiet. The couple is saved because a man with nothing left to lose accepts hell with a shrug, and the curse leaves the story on his shoulders, unresolved. Stevenson also grounds the tale in Pacific realities, the leprosy exile to Molokai above all, so the fantasy's stakes are borrowed from a genuine terror his Hawaiian readers knew. A fable that localises its hell is twice as strong.
The craft: the rule as plot generator
For writers, the story is the supreme example of rule-driven plotting. State a mechanism with total clarity, price must fall, bottle returns if cheated, damnation on death, and every subsequent scene is the rule meeting a new human temperament: the prudent friend, the desperate lover, the drunkard. Stevenson never bends the mechanism; surprise comes from character, and the arithmetic of one cent, seemingly a dead end, is beaten by thinking laterally about currencies, a solution planted fairly inside the rule. That is the covenant between fantasist and reader: the magic keeps its own law.
Study, too, how the story handles repetition. Keawe buys the bottle twice, and the second purchase reverses the meaning of the first: greed's instrument becomes love's. When a plot must revisit the same action, changing its moral direction is what keeps the return from feeling circular. Writory's September contest judges, scoring structure and emotional impact together, tend to mark that kind of mirrored repetition as mastery rather than economy of invention.
What poets can take from this
- State the bottle's three rules precisely in any exam answer; the plot is unintelligible without them.
- Track the price at every sale; the falling number is the story's clock.
- Use Kokua's centime scheme as evidence that the tale rewards lateral thought inside fixed rules.
- As a writer, let magic keep strict law and generate surprise from character instead.
- When a plot repeats an action, reverse its moral meaning the second time.
- Ground fantasy stakes in one real local terror, as Stevenson uses Molokai.
Try it yourself
Invent an object of power with three unbreakable rules, one of which seems to guarantee eventual disaster for somebody. Write the story of the owner who finds the honest loophole, and end with the person who accepts the disaster and why.
Questions
How does The Bottle Imp end?
Kokua secretly buys the bottle to save Keawe, and Keawe tries to buy it back to save her. A drunken boatswain purchases it for two centimes and then refuses to return it, saying he is bound for hell anyway and the bottle keeps him in rum. The curse departs with him, and Keawe and Kokua return to the Bright House in peace.
What are the rules of the bottle?
The imp grants its owner nearly any wish, but an owner who dies with the bottle burns in hell; it can only be sold for less than the buyer paid, in coined money; and it returns to anyone who tries to lose, destroy or unload it otherwise. The falling price is what makes the game deadly.
What does the story say about love?
Every owner before Keawe treats the bottle as an investment to be timed and escaped. Kokua is the first to buy it knowingly at a loss for someone else's sake, and Keawe immediately tries to do the same for her. Stevenson makes willing sacrifice the only force the bottle's arithmetic cannot corner.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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