The Monkey's Paw by W. W. Jacobs
Quick answer: The Monkey's Paw by W. W. Jacobs, summarised with the ending explained: the three wishes, the knock at the door, the characters, themes and craft.
An old soldier pulls a small dried paw from his pocket, tells his hosts it grants three wishes, and throws it on the fire. Mr White snatches it back out. That one gesture sets the most anthologised horror story in English moving toward its terrible knocking at the door. W. W. Jacobs published The Monkey's Paw in 1902 in his collection The Lady of the Barge, and it has stayed in print, in classrooms and on stages ever since.
The odd thing is that Jacobs was famous in his own lifetime as a comic writer of dockside tales. This story is the exception in his shelf, and it is close to perfect. It runs to roughly five thousand words, reads in twenty minutes, and still works on readers who know exactly what is coming, because its real subject is not magic at all. It is grief, and what grief will bargain for.
The story in brief, ending included
On a wet night in suburban England the White family, father, mother and grown son Herbert, entertain an old friend, Sergeant-Major Morris, home after twenty-one years in India. Pressed for stories, Morris reluctantly produces a mummified monkey's paw. A holy man, he says, put a spell on it so that three separate men could each have three wishes, his purpose being to show that fate rules people's lives and that those who interfere with fate do so to their sorrow. Morris has had his own three wishes and will not say what they were, only that the first owner's third wish was for death. He throws the paw into the fire; Mr White fishes it out. Half in fun, prompted by Herbert, the old man wishes for two hundred pounds, the sum that would clear the house. Nothing happens, though he swears the paw twisted in his hand like a snake.
The next day, while the Whites joke about the money, a sombre representative of Maw and Meggins calls. Herbert has been caught in the machinery at the works and killed, and the firm, admitting no liability, offers the parents a sum in compensation: exactly two hundred pounds. A week after the funeral, Mrs White, half mad with loss, remembers the paw and forces her husband to wish their son alive again. Mr White obeys, though he has seen the body and knows what two hundred pounds' worth of machinery does to a man. Late that night something begins to knock. The knocking swells from one soft rap to a fusillade against the door while Mrs White fumbles with the bolt and her husband scrabbles on the floor for the paw. As she finally drags the door open, he finds it and breathes his third wish. The knocking stops at once. The street outside stands empty and quiet under a flickering lamp.
The people at the table
Jacobs needs only five figures, and every one of them wants something small and human, which is why the story cuts so deep.
Themes: fate, grief and the cost of interfering
The exam readings are all defensible. Fate versus free will: the fakir designed the paw to prove that interference brings sorrow, and every wish confirms him. Be careful what you wish for: the two hundred pounds arrives, but priced in blood. Grief and its limits: Mrs White's demand to raise Herbert is the most sympathetic act in the story and also the most dangerous. You can add the colonial frame, since the paw is an object brought home from empire, trailing a knowledge the suburbs cannot handle.
Here is the sharper point worth making in an essay: the Whites are not greedy. They wish for a modest, sensible sum, the kind of wish a careful person makes, and the story destroys them anyway. Jacobs is not warning against excess. He is arguing that any attempt to shortcut fate, however humble, costs more than it gives, which is a far bleaker and more interesting moral than simple greed punished.
The craft: three wishes, three acts, one door
The structure is the old rule of three run with total discipline. Three owners of the paw, three wishes per owner, three acts in the story, and each beat arrives exactly where dread wants it. Notice too how much Jacobs keeps offstage. We never see Herbert's body, never see what climbs out of the cemetery, never see what stands knocking. Every horror is delivered by sound, inference or paperwork, and the reader's imagination, always crueller than any description, does the rest. That restraint is the single best technique here for a working writer to steal, and it is precisely the kind of control that scores under Storytelling and Structure when judges mark a contest story against a rubric.
There is also a quieter trick: deniability. Read closely and every supernatural event has a natural explanation. Herbert's death could be coincidence, the knocking could be anyone, the empty street proves nothing. Jacobs never lets you catch the magic in the act, so the story can never be dismissed, and the third wish, which is never spoken aloud on the page, becomes the most famous unwritten sentence in horror.
What the last knock means
Readers argue about the ending, and the argument is the point. Either the wish worked, something ten days dead walked from the cemetery, and Mr White's final wish sent it back, or nothing happened at all and an old man wished away his last chance to see his son. Both readings are terrible, and Jacobs holds the door shut on both. The lamp on the quiet street is one of fiction's great closing images because it shows you absence and lets you decide what was just absent from it.
What poets can take from this
- For exams, name the fakir's stated lesson, that those who interfere with fate do so to their sorrow, since it is the story's thesis in one line.
- Cite the two hundred pounds twice over, wish and compensation, as the story's central irony.
- Point out that all three horrors happen offstage, which is evidence for any question on tension or atmosphere.
- When you imitate Jacobs, deliver bad news through an official or a document; bureaucratic language makes horror colder.
- Keep your monster behind the door: what the reader imagines will beat anything you can describe.
- Structure a supernatural story so every event still has one natural explanation left standing.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which a character is granted one small, sensible favour, nothing extravagant, and the favour is honoured through a chain of ordinary, documented events that cost far more than they give. Keep every supernatural moment deniable, and end on a sound that stops.
Questions
What is the third wish in The Monkey's Paw?
Jacobs never writes the words, but the context makes it clear: Mr White wishes his resurrected son back into the grave, or simply gone. The knocking stops instantly and the street is empty, which is the story's proof that the wish was heard.
What is the moral of The Monkey's Paw?
The surface moral is be careful what you wish for, but the sharper one is the fakir's: fate rules lives, and interfering with it brings sorrow. The Whites wish modestly and are ruined anyway, so the story punishes interference itself, not greed.
Is the magic in The Monkey's Paw ever confirmed?
No. Every event, including Herbert's death and the knocking, has a possible natural explanation, and Jacobs is careful never to show magic working on the page. That ambiguity is deliberate and is a large part of why the story endures.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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