The story commences with the highly literate and educated grammar and lexicon one might expect to find in a written work of scholarly analysis. Phrases like “prima mobilia of the human soul” mingle with references to phrenology to make a claim that science has so failed to appropriately explore, much less explain, the universal existence of perversity in the human species. Such an exploration has, in fact been dismissed on the basis that no explanation is required by such motivations are by definition viewed as unnecessary to existence. Thus, the only response to the “imp of the perverse” has been the adoption of faith as protection against it. Soon, however, it becomes clear that this not a scientific monograph written for posterity, but the first-person narration of the tale by a condemned man awaiting execution who then proceeds to relate his own story.
Confessing the obvious—that he is himself one of the “many uncounted victims of the Imp of the Perverse”—he follows with a full accounting of how he planned a murder for months before committing it. A thousand different plans were considered and rejected before settling upon inspiration discovered in an account of a woman who had nearly been killed by an accidental candle poisoning. Since he was fully aware of the habit of his intended victim to read in bed inside his narrow and badly ventilated apartment, a poisoned candle was deemed ideal to his strategy. The coroner’s verdict made it clear he had quite literally gotten away with murder when the victim was declared dead “by the visitation of God.”
The consequence of the murder is the narrator’s inheritance of the man’s estate. That wealth, though robust, paled in value next to the sheer thrill of triumph he would enjoy every time he realized how easily he had gotten away the deed without even the fear of detection, having taken every precaution to ensure no evidence could link him to the man’s demise. As the years pass, however, the narrator asks the reader to indulge themselves in the familiarity of what is today called an “earworm.” For the narrator, with each passing experience of fulfillment at knowing he’d gone yet another day without being caught also came the earworm which he could not detach: “I am safe.” But why continue to tell yourself that you are safe if you really believe you safe?
The assertion repeats, builds and takes over the rational mind of the man until one day he finds himself madly muttering to himself over and over that he is safe and, of course, he will remain safe because to confess without suspicion would be foolish. He is suddenly drawn short by the recognition of what is occurring based on familiarity with past experience. The imp of the perverse has made its attack upon his rational mind and is working to deliver him directly into the sphere of the irrational: a confession. It is an attack from which he literally tries to run, but one cannot escape putting the perverse thought into perverse action when it is inside you. This recognition drives him also beyond the point of perversity: imagining that cutting out his own tongue obstruct the inevitable.
And that point the irrational drive to act so perversely against one’s best interest so subsumes the narrator that his relation of what happened next can only be told in retrospect based upon the witness testimony of others. “They say” that he spoke clearly and emphatically as he made a passionate confession, speaking so breathlessly that it appeared as though he feared the impact of having been interrupted. And then, they say, he fainted dead away and eventually wound up sitting in the prison cell, fettered in chains for one last day until he is marched to his execution tomorrow.
