Anderson: ‘The Egg’

 “Most philosophers must have been raised on chicken farms.”

That sentence comes from Sherwood Anderson’s short story “The Egg,” a tale about doomed parents.

The narrator has grown up and is reflecting on his parents’ lives, two people who seemed satisfied at one time and then wanted more. 

The American passion of getting up in the world took possession of them.

Father was a happy-go-lucky farmworker until, at 35, he married a country-school teacher. Mother wanted nothing for herself but was ambitious for her husband and son.

And so the narrator’s parents started a chicken farm. When that failed, they started a café at a railroad station, a bit too far from the customers in town.

Father had collected specimens of chicks — preserved in alcohol in small bottles — hatched with four legs or two heads or two sets of wings. He hauled the collection from failed farm to new café as a kind of talisman.

As the business at the café got increasingly desperate, Father decided that the key to success was having patrons come away with the idea that they’d been entertained. He tried to interest a customer in the trick of getting an egg inside a bottle. And of course he eventually shows his prized collection. It was not a great moment in marketing.

It’s a picture adult failure as witnessed by a child.