The Egg by Sherwood Anderson

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

"The Egg" 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 "the egg"—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 an egg, 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 "the egg," 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 an egg. 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 an egg in vinegar so that it can be pushed inside a bottle. He promises to give the customer the egg-in-the-bottle, but again his trick proves difficult. In a final, desperate effort to force the egg into the narrow container, the father breaks the egg and spatters it on his clothes. Already leaving, the customer turns for a moment and laughs.

The father, consumed with anger, fires an egg at the retreating customer. Then, grasping another egg, 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 the egg gently 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 the egg—"why eggs had to be and why from the egg came the hen who again laid the egg"—a question that gets into his blood and remains with him unresolved into adulthood.