Eggs

David Limpert is the nine-year-old protagonist of Eggs, and his primary inner conflict comes from his overwhelming grief over his mother’s sudden death a year before the novel’s events. David’s grief manifests in erratic ways. For example, he feels anger toward anyone who might try to mother him, like his grandmother, and he strictly adheres to a range of arbitrary superstitions. The most prominent of these is his determination never to break rules, and he even believes that “if he went a long enough time without breaking a rule […] a score would be settled, and his mother would come back” (31). David also keeps his memento of his mother a secret from everyone, and he distances himself from things that remind him of his mother, such as his favorite bedtime story and even the sunrise.

David’s life is lonely because his father is away during the week, and he also misses all of his friends in Minnesota. He has no one to provide him with comfort aside from the grandmother he rejects. Into this bleak existence comes his unlikely friend Primrose. David first encounters her when he mistakenly believes that she is a dead girl in the forest; rather than being afraid, he immediately spills his story to her “corpse,” and this incongruous scene emphasizes his fixation upon death.