Eggs

The titular symbol of eggs symbolizes both David and Primrose, as their emotionally hard exteriors protect their emotional vulnerabilities. David in particular keeps his grief locked deep inside, refusing to allow anyone to get close to him. This pattern is most evident in his rejection of his grandmother, who wants nothing more than to comfort him. When David’s grandmother tries to curb his misbehavior, her attempts at discipline do not register with him. At the end of Chapter 5, after defying his grandmother’s latest restriction, David reflects that “[n]o one, not grandmothers, not anyone, could touch him. His mother’s death had made him invincible” (24). At this point, David believes his hard shell will shield him from consequences. His grandmother’s cautious treatment of him also evokes the colloquialism of “walking on eggshells,” reinforcing the symbolism of David as an egg. By treating him delicately, she shows her understanding that his seemingly hard shell is actually quite fragile, and she gives him space to come to terms with his emotions in his own way.

Primrose’s relationship to the egg symbol can be seen in her van, which her peers often pelt with literal eggs. Despite these disturbances, Primrose’s van is her sanctuary, the only place that is entirely hers, and she fills it with her hopes and dreams, like her stack of House Beautiful magazines and her framed photo of her “father,” whom she later reveals is just a photo of an actor that she pretends is her father. Thus, Primrose keeps her comforts close to her, sealed in her “egg” of a van. This idea is reinforced by the fact that she paints the van’s windows, giving the vehicle a completely white exterior, much like the titular egg. Her van, therefore, becomes her own protective shell, which shields her from the world’s unpleasant realities.

The egg-related imagery appears one more time in the final chapters, when Primrose takes David to see the sunrise and helps him to authentically connect to his grief. He beholds the sunrise for the first time since his mother’s death and sees it as “crisp and sharp and beautiful and smooth as a painted egg” (208), which then becomes a “plump breakfast yellow of egg yolk […], flooding the river and the city and the trees and every dark corner of the world” (208-209). This egg imagery highlights the moment in which David’s own metaphorical shell finally “breaks.” Primrose, too, discards her shell at the end of the novel and chooses to move back into her home with her mother, showing that she is ready to accept her mother’s love.