The Monkey's Paw

W.W. Jacobs’ The Monkey Paw was a pretty chilling short story. And by short story, I mean probably 5-10 pages long. But even though it was super short, it was super disturbing! The story gave the reader something serious to think about and was left with an open ending, to leave you to your imagination. It didn’t have a lot of words in the story, but the words were enough to really create some thought and ask the question, what would I do in that situation? Like the tag line says, "Be careful what you wish for, you may receive it."
Right away the story started out with the typical “it was a dark and stormy night.” In this day, you know that a good scary story always starts out like that. It sets the mood for something mysterious and chilling. There isn’t even time to set up the characters, it just starts out in the middle of their lives. The man who brings in the paw of the monkey doesn’t even have that much introduction. We just have to keep following where W.W. Jacob’s takes us. But then comes the thing that really draws us in, the monkey’s paw and its magic. It was such a quick draw for such a short story.
The paw of the monkey is the main allegory of the story. It represents a lot of ideas. First, the paw represents desire and greed. The paw is something for the family to use as a quick-fix. They are warned that the wishes it grants can bring a lot of pain and misery but it doesn’t matter to them because the idea of what kinds of things they could have is way more important. The White family wasn’t a family of need, and they were a family who joked with each other and had good senses of humor. But even they fell into the temptation. Later, after the tragedies have happened, the paw could represent guilt. It was easy to blame the paw for the tragic death of their son. When someone dies, it is easy to blame others or yourself. So the paw was a good thing to blame because without it, if death of their son still happened, the blame would