The Eggby: Marshall, S. Elaine, Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition

The EggBy: Marshall, S. Elaine, Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition,

Literary Reference Center

SherwoodAnderson
Born:September 13, 1876; Camden, Ohio
Died:March 8, 1941; Colón, Panama Canal Zone

Quick Reference

First published:1921

Type of plot:Regional

Time of work:The beginning of the twentieth century

Locale:A small town in Ohio

Principal Characters:

The narrator, a man relating events from his childhood

His father, a failed entrepreneur

His mother, a loving, ambitious wife

Joe Kane, a customer in their restaurant

The Story

“TheEgg” tells the story of a childhood memory that has in a profound way shaped its narrator’s moral outlook. The tale centers on the narrator’s father, a man “intended by nature to be . . . cheerful [and] kindly,” who, through acquiring the “American passion for getting up in the world,” loses his happiness. The father’s loss engenders in the son a sense of tragedy and irresolution and a conviction that “theegg” — the source and symbol of that loss — completely and utterly triumphs over life.

The narrator begins his story by describing his father’s life as a farmhand in the rural Midwest. The older man is content in this position; he enjoys his work and the easy camaraderie of the other farmhands, who gather at a local saloon on Saturday nights. Dissatisfaction does not strike him until, at age thirty-five, he marries. His wife, “a tall silent woman with a long nose and troubled grey eyes,” initiates a change in his life. While wanting nothing for herself, she is nevertheless “incurably ambitious” for her husband and for the son born to them — the narrator. At her prompting, the man leaves the farm and, with his new family, moves closer to town to take up chicken raising.

From the chicken farm, the young narrator gains his initial impressions of life. There he sees at first hand the inescapable tragedy of the chicken:

It is born out of anegg, lives for a few weeks as a tiny fluffy thing such as you will see
pictured on Easter cards, then becomes hideously naked, eats quantities of corn and meal bought
by the sweat of your father’s brow, gets diseases . . . stands looking with stupid eyes at the
sun, becomes sick and dies.

The miserable cycle of chickenkind comes to be, for the narrator, a paradigm for human life; the chickens are so much like people that, in his mind, “they mix one up in one’s judgments of life.” The narrator’s primary problem, however, is not with “the hen,” the mature bird already locked in its mortal coils, but with “theegg,” the source of potential new life.

Against such odds as the narrator describes, chicken raising proves to be a futile struggle. Selling the chicken farm, the family loads a small wagon with their possessions and begins the slow journey to a railroad way station, where they plan to open a restaurant. Along the way, the boy-narrator, noticing his father’s balding head, imagines the bare swath of skin as a path going to “a far beautiful place where life was a happy eggless affair.” The father, however, carries with him a memento of the chicken days — a collection of “grotesques . . . born out of eggs,” alcohol-preserved specimens of two-headed or six-legged chicks hatched over the years on his farm. These he keeps in the simple belief that people like “to look at strange and wonderful things.”

After some time in the restaurant trade, the father decides that his lack of success in business derives from his failure to be pleasant enough; he resolves, therefore, to “adopt a cheerful outlook on life.” The central event of the story comes of this decision. One night while the father is tending the restaurant, a young man comes in to pass the time. Convinced that this is the moment to put into action his new cheerfulness, the father begins to imagine ways to entertain the customer. His nervousness, however, strikes the young man as odd; the customer believes the proprietor wants him to leave. Before he can do so, the father begins to perform a trick with anegg. When the trick fails to capture the young man’s attention, the father brings down from the shelf his collection of pickled grotesques. When this, too, fails to interest the customer, he tries another trick — heating aneggin vinegar so that it can be pushed inside a bottle. He promises to give the customer theegg-in-the-bottle, but again his trick proves difficult. In a final, desperate effort to force theegginto the narrow container, the father breaks theeggand spatters it on his clothes. Already leaving, the customer turns for a moment and laughs.

The father, consumed with anger, fires aneggat the retreating customer. Then, grasping anotheregg, he runs upstairs to the bedroom where his wife and son are no longer sleeping. The narrator, remembering his thoughts at the moment, imagines that his father “had some idea of destroying it, of destroying all eggs,” but instead he lays theegggently down and drops to his knees, crying. The mother quietly strokes her husband’s balding head. The son, troubled by this scene of his father’s grief, weeps too. Into the night, the boy ponders the question of theegg— “why eggs had to be and why from theeggcame the hen who again laid theegg” — a question that gets into his blood and remains with him unresolved into adulthood.

Themes and Meanings

Given its title and the narrator’s statement that his tale “if correctly told will centre on theegg,” theeggis unquestionably crucial toSherwoodAnderson’sstory. As an image, theeggpromotes the possibility for new life, as well as the simultaneous fragility and resilience of that life. For the narrator, however, theegg’sspecial power is to condemn the young possibility, the passionate promise of life, to a relentless round of decay and death. He sees this power of theeggoperative in his father, whose “new impulse in life” — to leave the farm and make his fortune in the urban world — is ruined by theegg. Ironically, though, at his moment of crisis, the father preserves rather than destroys theegg. Despite his failure, he values the life in theeggjust as he values the “poor little things” that he saves in the jars as a source of wonder.

For the narrator, theeggacquires ever larger significance. “Prenatally” involved not only with his father’s fortunes but also with the narrator’s own moral disposition, theeggof that night in the bedroom is inextricably linked with the innumerable eggs laid and hatched by his father’s chickens. Conjoined with the narrator’s ability to think and articulate his thoughts — a talent that his father, as a physical man, lacks — theegggains the power of generality. It becomes for the narrator the source and symbol of the tragic cycle of life so vividly experienced on the chicken farm, a cycle whose most enduring creations are the pitiful monstrosities preserved by his father. Eventually, the narrator’s general view of theeggleads him to the ultimate metaphysical question — the “why” of theeggthat implants itself in his mind and leaves him with a feeling of irresolution.

Though the narrator cannot solve logically the question of theegg, he does solve it creatively. The irresolution that theeggengenders in him in fact impels him to attempt, through his tale, to articulate his uncertainty in a form that, like theegg, is in itself whole and complete and pregnant with life. Theegg— particularly that one that his father holds in his hand when he enters the bedroom — functions as the fertile ovum from which the boy’s imagination prepares for the story that he tells as an adult. Focusing as it does the narrator’s memory of his and his father’s mutual grief at the failing of life to live up to its early promise, theegggives birth to the new, narrative act. “TheEgg,” not the idea of theegg, triumphs.

Style and Technique

Much of the power of “TheEgg” comes from the narrator’s ability to articulate the inner life of his father. This difference between father and son becomes indirectly the subject of a passage in which the narrator explains his father’s decision to become cheerful:

It was father’s notion that a passion for the company of himself and mother would spring
up in the breasts of the younger people of the town of Bidwell. . . . They would troop shouting
with joy and laughter into our place. There would be joy and festivity. I do not mean to give the
impression that father spoke so elaborately of the matter. He was as I have said an uncommunicativeman. “They want some place to go. I tell you they want some place to go,” he said over and over.That was as far as he got. My own imagination has filled in the blanks.

The father’s repetitive statement reveals in a rough and untutored way his simple urge toward a better life. However, he is not more able to carry out this urge in action than he is able to express it in words. In fact, the urge itself, the ambition to rise in life, leads him out of his natural element — the rural and masculine life of a farmhand — and into the urban, feminine, and civilized town life that requires a greater complexity of mind, speech, and social savvy than he possesses.

In contrast, the son imagines in detail what his father could only minimally verbalize. This act of imagination joins the father and son, for in order for the narrator to relate his father’s inner life he must himself intimately experience that life. However, the imaginative act also advances the son beyond the father. The son, grown into an adult, understands what the father only felt. As a narrator conscious of telling a story to “you,” his reader, he achieves the ability to communicate that his father lacked. Furthermore, in seeing his father’s suffering, the narrator is led to speculate about the complexity of life. In doing so, he becomes a more complex man, a man who gives life in words to his father’s mute yearnings. In style, the narrator is true to his father’s inner vision, for his sophistication of mind is rendered in simple diction and sentences, in a voice that his father might have used had he been able to speak his heart.

Essay by:S. Elaine Marshall