At a billiards parlor, Archy chases balls in the hope of being crushed, until the players see him and sweep him into a trash can. When he tries to spray himself with pesticide, he accidentally kills George the fly. His friends try to help by knocking an ink bottle over on him as he again jumps over the ledge, but, again, the wind gently drops Archy to safety. He then jumps off the window ledge, but flutters safely to the ground. He writes a letter to his "boss," the reporter, and says goodbye to his friends, Freddy the rat and Harry the tarantula. Feeling rejected and suicidal, Archy is almost run over by a car. Although Archy warns that Tattersall is a phony, Mehitabel goes with him, leaving Archy behind. Tattersall, an old and frayed-looking impresario cat, comes to the alley and offers to make Mehitabel a star. She says that although he is an ugly bug and she a glamorous and irresistible cat, they are both "flotsam and jetsam on the sea of life." Archy almost has her convinced to get a job as a house cat, when Tyrone T. Despite her anger, Mehitabel eventually admits that she treats Archy badly, but, in the end, he is always right. When she argues that she left her lover Ralph, Archy reminds her that the cat was dead at the time. Although Mehitabel reports that she left Bill, Archy doubts that she has ever left a tomcat.
Archy tries to reason with Mehitabel, saying that her morals are the "lowest, loosest and limpest," but she counters that she has never claimed to have any. When the abusive Bill breaks up with Mehitabel, she returns to Shinbone Alley the worse for wear, engendering the gossip of the neighborhood felines. While worrying about Mehitabel, Archy pours out his heart in his writings and reports on his brief acquaintance with a moth who fried himself on a lightbulb in order to see the secret heart of a flame. For his interfering, Archy is flicked away by the randy couple. Mehitabel claims she is in love, but Archy thinks she has a predilection for tomcats. When two tomcats, led by a feline named Big Bill, return to Shinbone Alley after being away on the prowl, Bill and Mehitabel resume their once-broken affair. " Sometimes Archy worries that she is too exuberant and should find a job as a well-bred house cat, but Mehitabel finds his morality annoying. Archy writes that, despite her hard life, she continues to sing and dance " toujours gai. One of the stories he writes about is that of a sexy cat, Mehitabel, whose heart has been broken a thousand times, and who insists she is the reincarnation of Cleopatra. For his efforts, Archy says, he needs neither credit nor salary, but only the right to create his "immortal poetry." An important alliance is thus formed, the first in newspaper history, between the cockroach and the reporter, as Archy writes about the city from its underside. He asks the reporter who uses the typewriter by day to put paper in the typewriter every night and leave apple peelings for him to eat, offering in exchange to type exclusive stories about his back alley world.
Because he is unable to work the shift key, his missive is entirely in lowercase letters, but his words reflect the observations of a deep thinker. After entering a newspaper office one night, Archy begins to type a message on the typewriter by jumping from key to key, which amuses his insect friends. A philosophical fellow, Archy concludes that he has been "transmigrated" into a cockroach and that he used to be a poet who felt like a cockroach, and now is a cockroach who feels like a poet.
Realizing that as a cockroach, he is acquainted with all the little insects and animals that he never knew before, Archy feel comfortable with his life in Shinbone Alley, his new neighborhood. In New York City, a poet commits suicide by jumping off a bridge, and to his dismay, is reincarnated as a cockroach named Archy.
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