I’ve been reading a number of short stories of late, inspired by the new Substack podcast, Classics Read Aloud, but it’s impossible for me to do a full analysis on all the stories I read, even only the ones I think are superlative. In January I had two posts on a full analysis of Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” (here and here).
One such story I just read was the great American short
story by Sherwood
Anderson, “The Egg.” I’m surprised
this story doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry.
It’s a frequently anthologized story from Sherwood Anderson, and
possibly his most well-known. His
collection of stories in Winesburg, Ohio published
in 1919 centers around the characters of his fictional town of the title
centered around the central character of George Willard. The central organizing principle of Winesburg,
Ohio is that the psychological makeup of the characters, shaped by their
small town life, leads to a sort of grotesque reshaping of their person. “The Egg,” published in 1921 and perhaps an
outtake of the 1919 collect, follows the same form. The unnamed Father in the story is reshaped by
his acquired life of a small town chicken farmer and subsequent small
restauranteur.
You can read the story here and listen to Ruby Love at Classics Read Aloud read it here.
The story is told in the first person of the Father’s son. Father, Mother, and Son are all unnamed. The story is at first mostly exposition of the life of Father, first as a single farmhand, then marrying Mother, taking up the chicken farm as a result of his wife’s ambitions, and then having their son. After failing as a chicken farmer, the exposition takes us to Father starting a small restaurant beside the town’s railroad station.
Of course there is the symbolism of the egg, but I think to fully understand this story is to see Father as one of the grotesqueries that came out of the eggs. There are many uses of irony in the story but I think transformation of Father from a lucky-as-you-go sort to a distorted figure of a man because of ambition and the hard luck of life is the most ironic. The story is so tragic comic, one laughs and has pity at the same time. After the narrative climax of failing to entertain a man, Joe Kane, at his restaurant with tricks using an egg, the Father is reduced to a childlike grotesque when he comes home to cry to his wife and son.
Here is the scene.
For two or three weeks this notion of father's invaded our house. We did not talk much, but in our daily lives tried earnestly to make smiles take the place of glum looks. Mother smiled at the boarders and I, catching the infection, smiled at our cat. Father became a little feverish in his anxiety to please. There was no doubt, lurking somewhere in him, a touch of the spirit of the showman. He did not waste much of his ammunition on the railroad men he served at night but seemed to be waiting for a young man or woman from Bidwell to come in to show what he could do. On the counter in the restaurant there was a wire basket kept always filled with eggs, and it must have been before his eyes when the idea of being entertaining was born in his brain. There was something pre-natal about the way eggs kept themselves connected with the development of his idea. At any rate an egg ruined his new impulse in life. Late one night I was awakened by a roar of anger coming from father's throat. Both mother and I sat upright in our beds. With trembling hands she lighted a lamp that stood on a table by her head. Downstairs the front door of our restaurant went shut with a bang and in a few minutes father tramped up the stairs. He held an egg in his hand and his hand trembled as though he were having a chill. There was a half insane light in his eyes. As he stood glaring at us I was sure he intended throwing the egg at either mother or me. Then he laid it gently on the table beside the lamp and dropped on his knees beside mother's bed. He began to cry like a boy and I, carried away by his grief, cried with him. The two of us filled the little upstairs room with our wailing voices. It is ridiculous, but of the picture we made I can remember only the fact that mother's hand continually stroked the bald path that ran across the top of his head. I have forgotten what mother said to him and how she induced him to tell her of what had happened downstairs. His explanation also has gone out of my mind. I remember only my own grief and fright and the shiny path over father's head glowing in the lamp light as he knelt by the bed.
The moment where father and son are by the bed crying together captures the story in a nutshell: tragi comedy reduced to a moment of pity, Father as grotesque and failure, Mother as the motivating fulcrum of the family, and the son in a coming-of-age moment of his life. Is this the climax of the story or a denouement? Sometimes it’s hard to tell. The narrative climax may have been the moment when Father in frustration throws the egg at Joe Kane. That’s the height of the narrative. But this scene where Father collapses to tears from failure could be seen as the emotional climax.
My other insight on this story is that the first-person narrator, though a little awkward in places, especially in that climatic scene with Joe Kane, is perfect to accentuate the tragicomic effect. I don't think the story would have been as good in third person. We pity Father because of the immediacy of the son telling the story.
Here’s another interesting tidbit. The story was published in 1921 when Anderson was forty-five years old, the same age as the Father in the story. Does the author identify with the son who is telling the story or with the father who was a business failure living in Ohio just as Anderson was in his life? Perhaps both.
By the way, I felt the pity much more when I just listened
to it being read than reading the story off the page. It felt more powerful. I
wonder if others reacted similarly.
