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The Strange Triumph of “The Little Prince”

By Adam Gopnik

Of all the books written in French over the past century, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “Le Petit Prince” is surely the best loved in the most tongues. This is very strange, because the book’s meanings—its purpose and intent and moral—still seem far from transparent, even seventy-five-plus years after its first appearance. Indeed, the startling thing, looking again at the first reviews of the book, is that, far from being welcomed as a necessary and beautiful parable, it bewildered and puzzled its readers. Among the early reviewers, only P. L. Travers—who had, with a symmetry that makes the nonbeliever shiver, written an equivalent myth for England in her Mary Poppins books—really grasped the book’s dimensions, or its importance.

Over time, the suffrage of readers has altered that conclusion, of course: a classic is a classic. But it has altered the conclusion without really changing the point. This year marks an efflorescence of attention, including a full-scale exhibition of Saint-Exupéry’s original artwork at the Morgan Library & Museum, in New York. But we are no closer to penetrating the central riddle: What is “The Little Prince” about ?

Everyone knows the basic bones of the story: an aviator, downed in the desert and facing long odds of survival, encounters a strange young person, neither man nor really boy, who, it emerges over time, has travelled from his solitary home on a distant asteroid, where he lives alone with a single rose. The rose has made him so miserable that, in torment, he has taken advantage of a flock of birds to convey him to other planets. He is instructed by a wise if cautious fox, and by a sinister angel of death, the snake.

It took many years—and many readings—for this reader to begin to understand that the book is a war story . Not an allegory of war, rather, a fable of it, in which the central emotions of conflict—isolation, fear, and uncertainty—are alleviated only by intimate speech and love. But the “Petit Prince” is a war story in a very literal sense, too—everything about its making has to do not just with the onset of war but with the “strange defeat” of France, with the experience of Vichy and the Occupation. Saint-Exupéry’s sense of shame and confusion at the devastation led him to make a fable of abstract ideas set against specific loves. In this enterprise, he sang in unconscious harmony with the other great poets of the war’s loss, from J. D. Salinger—whose great post-war story, “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” shows us moral breakdown eased only by the speech of a lucid child—to his contemporary Albert Camus, who also took from the war the need to engage in a perpetual battle “between each man’s happiness and the illness of abstraction,” meaning the act of distancing real emotion from normal life.

We know the circumstances of the composition of “The Little Prince” in detail now, courtesy of Stacy Schiff’s fine biography, “Saint-Exupéry.” Escaped from Europe to an unhappy, monolingual exile in North America, engaged in petty but heated internecine warfare with the other exile and resisting groups (he had a poor opinion of DeGaulle, who, he wrongly thought, was setting the French against the French, rather than against the Germans), Saint-Exupéry wrote this most French of fables in Manhattan and Long Island. The book’s desert setting derives from the aviator Saint-Exupéry’s 1935 experience of having been lost for almost a week in the Arabian desert, with his memories of loneliness, hallucination, impending death (and enveloping beauty) in the desert realized on the page. The central love story of the Prince and Rose derives from his stormy love affair with his wife, Consuelo, from whom the rose takes her cough and her flightiness and her imperiousness and her sudden swoons. (While he had been lost in the desert in ’35, Schiff tells us, she had been publicly mourning his loss on her own ‘asteroid,’ her table at the Brasserie Lipp.) The desert and the rose—his life as an intrepid aviator and his life as a baffled lover—were his inspiration. But between those two experiences, skewering them, dividing them with a line, was the war.

In the deepest parts of his psyche, he had felt the loss of France not just as a loss of battle but also as a loss of meaning . The desert of the strange defeat was more bewildering than the desert of Libya had been; nothing any longer made sense. Saint-Ex’s own war was honorable: he flew with the GR II/33 reconnaissance squadron of the Armée de l’Air . And, after the bitter defeat, he fled Europe like so many other patriotic Frenchmen, travelling through Portugal and arriving in New York on the last day of 1940. But, as anyone who lived through it knew, what made the loss so traumatic was the sense that the entire underpinning of French civilization, not merely its armies, had come, so to speak, under the scrutiny of the gods and, with remarkable speed, collapsed.

Searching for the causes of that collapse, the most honest honorable minds—Marc Bloch and Camus among them—thought that the real fault lay in the French habit of abstraction. The French tradition that moved, and still moves, pragmatic questions about specific instances into a parallel paper universe in which the general theoretical question—the model—is what matters most had failed its makers. Certainly, one way of responding to the disaster was to search out some new set of abstractions, of overarching categories to replace those lost. But a more humane response was to engage in a ceaseless battle against all those abstractions that keep us from life as it is. No one put this better than the heroic Bloch himself:

The first task of my trade (i.e. of the historian, but more broadly the humanist properly so called) consists in avoiding big-sounding abstract terms. Those who teach history should be continually concerned with the task of seeking the solid and concrete behind the empty and abstract. In other words, it is on men rather than functions that they should concentrate all their attention.

This might seem like a very odd moral to take from the experience of something as devastating as the war. But it wasn’t merely intellectual, an amateur’s non-combatant epiphany. At a purely tactical, military level, the urge to abstraction had meant the urge to fetishize fixed, systematic solutions at the expense of tactical fluidity and resourcefulness. The Maginot line was an abstract idea that had been allowed to replace flexible strategy and common sense. (One recalls Picasso’s comment to Matisse, when the troubled French painter asked him, in 1940, “But what about our generals, what are they doing?”: “Our generals? They’re the masters at the Ecole des Beaux Arts!” Picasso responded, meaning men possessed by the same rote formulae and absence of observation and obsessive traditionalism as the academic artists.

From an experience that was so dehumanizing and overwhelming—an experience that turns an entire human being with a complicated life history and destiny first into a cipher and then into a casualty—Saint-Exupéry wanted to rescue the person, not the statistic. The statistics could be any of those the men on the planets are obsessed with, the ‘counting’ fetish that might take in stars if one is an astronomer or profits for businessmen. The richest way to see “Le Petit Prince” is as an extended parable of the kinds and follies of abstraction—and the special intensity and poignance of the story is that Saint-Exupéry dramatizes the struggle against abstraction not as a philosophical subject but as a life-and-death story. The book moves from asteroid to desert, from fable and comedy to enigmatic tragedy, in order to make one recurrent point: You can’t love roses. You can only love a rose.

For all of the Prince’s journey is a journey of exile, like Saint-Exupéry’s, away from generic experience towards the eroticism of the particular flower. To be responsible for his rose, the Prince learns, is to see it as it really is, in all its fragility and vanity—indeed, in all its utter commonness!—without loving it less for being so fragile. The persistent triumph of specific experience can be found in something as idiosyncratic and bizarre as the opening image of a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant, which, the narrator tells us, the grownups can only see as a generic object. (This is where Saint-Ex and the Surrealists who admired him—a tracing of his hand appears in one of the issues of the Surrealist journal Minotaur —touch. Rene Magritte’s paintings, with their very similar obsession with middle-class hats, suggest that every time you see a bourgeois derby there may be a boa constrictor inside. The X-ray of every hat reveals a boa constrictor in every head. That could be the motto of every Surrealist exhibition.)

The men the Prince meets on his journey to Earth are all men who have, in Bloch’s sense, been reduced to functions. The Businessman, the Astronomer, even the poor Lamplighter, have become their occupations, and gone blind to the stars. It is, again, the essential movement we find in Camus, only in “The Little Prince” it is shown to us as comic fable rather than realistic novel. The world conspires to make us blind to its own workings; our real work is to see the world again.

A version of this essay first appeared, in French, in the magazine France-Amerique; it was also the subject of a lecture at the Morgan Library & Museum.

Books & Fiction

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By Adam Douglas Thompson

By Anna Wiener

By Bruce Headlam

The Literary Edit

Review: The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I often wonder if I’ll ever reach a point in my reading life where I’m satisfied by the amount of books I’ve read; where I can say with confidence that I’ve read the classics and the critically acclaimed that have long haunted my to-be-read pile. Thus far, 2019 has been a good year for books: I read my first Agatha Christie, I read a Russian classic hailed by many as the best book of the twentieth century. I finished thirteen books in January; more in the months that have since passed. I too have read my first book by an Indonesian author, and a couple of contemporary novels I’ve had my eye on for a while. And yet, and yet, there are still many hundred of books I fear I may never get around to reading, unless given a particular reason to do so.

The Little Prince was one of the said unread books until a fortnight ago. While I’m sure I may have read it as a child, as an adult it’s always been a book that had never quite made it to my list of reading priorities until a friend recommended it recently. I had just finished The Master and Margarita when I was queuing for a coffee at my local bookshop in Bondi, Gertrude & Alice, and I saw they had the Penguin Classic edition was on sale. With no plans for the rest of the morning, hot drink in hand, I settled myself down to read, the air infused with coffee beans and the hum of idle chatter.

Beloved by many since its first publication in 1943, Antoine De Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince is an enchanting fable imbued with life lessons that tells the tale of a little boy who leaves the safety of his own tiny planet to travel the universe, learning the intricacies of adult behaviour through a series of unexpected encounters.

A profound and poetic tale, the story is a philosophical one and through its social criticism of the adult world, reminds its readers that we were all children once. Written during a period when Saint-Exupéry fled to North America subsequent to the Fall of France during the Second World War, it is, according to one review, “…an allegory of Saint-Exupéry’s own life—his search for childhood certainties and interior peace, his mysticism, his belief in human courage and brotherhood, and his deep love for his wife Consuelo but also an allusion to the tortured nature of their relationship.”

Rich with timeless lessons that are cushioned behind layers of delightful story-telling. The Little Prince is the sort of book that will inspire wonder and reflection, even in the most cynical, and world-weary adult.

And so, to end, my favourite quote from this poignant and profound novella: “The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”

About The Little Prince

Moral allegory and spiritual autobiography, The Little Prince is the most translated book in the French language. With a timeless charm it tells the story of a little boy who leaves the safety of his own tiny planet to travel the universe, learning the vagaries of adult behaviour through a series of extraordinary encounters. His personal odyssey culminates in a voyage to Earth and further adventures.

About Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Antoine De Saint-Exupéry was born in 1900 in Lyon. In 1921, he began his training as a pilot By 1926, he had became one of the pioneers of international postal flight. In 1935 he embarked on a record-breaking attempt to fly from Paris to Saigon. Nineteen hours into the flight, his plane crashed in the Sahara desert. He survived the crash but spent three days battling dehydration, limited food and hallucinations. On the fourth day, the was rescued. In part, this experience was the inspiration for  The Little Prince . He continued to fly until World War II, during which he took self-imposed exile. On 31 July 1944, he disappeared over the Mediterranean while flying a reconnaissance mission.

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4 comments on “Review: The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry”

What a lovely post! I am a new subscriber from Sweden. Looking forward to read more reviews from you!

Thanks for stopping by Anna and for your lovely words – they made my day! xo

I love the little prince it’s my favourite book

It’s a really lovely, touching tale, isn’t it? xo

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The Little Prince review – the visitor from B-612 reinterpreted

T o all appearances The Little Prince is a children’s book. But ever since its original publication in French in 1943, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s story has enchanted audiences of all ages. The book’s beloved hero is a small, blond-haired boy from asteroid B-612, which he leaves to journey across the galaxy. Along his way, he visits a number of planets each populated by a sole person with an absurd profession (the little prince ultimately learns that there is no other kind). When he lands on Earth, in the middle of the desert, he is met by a mysterious snake. “Where are all the people?” the little prince asks. “I’m beginning to feel lonely in this desert.” “You can feel lonely among people, too,” replies the snake.

However elusive the story’s meaning, few have matched the universality of its appeal. In April 2017, The Little Prince became the most translated book in the world, excluding religious texts (which enjoyed significant head starts). It now exists in 300 languages, a sum that doesn’t even include the range of translations within languages. In Korean, there are said to be about 50 different versions. Until recently, English could claim only a meagre six. Now, Michael Morpurgo , master storyteller and untested translator, has delivered a definitive seventh.

“To be asked to translate one of the greatest stories ever written was an honour I could not refuse,” Morpurgo writes in his foreword. “And if I am honest, I thought my knowledge of French would be just about up to it. Well, I was wrong about that.” The mistake is easy to make, even if Morpurgo’s modesty deceives. The Little Prince is known for its spare and simple prose, and while it is studied in universities, it is taught to beginners of French at school. Saint-Exupéry worked through dozens of drafts to achieve the final aesthetic. On the surface, it leaves translators little room to manoeuvre and it’s tempting to ask: do we really need all these different translations? Or are publishers just trying to cash in (say, by adding a celebrity author)? But on a deeper level, Saint-Exupéry’s style is notoriously hard to replicate, and so perhaps a worthy translation requires more than good French.

Morpurgo’s version certainly suggests so, a few strange decisions aside. As with his own work, there is a clarity and directness, an affinity with the animal world, all underlined by emotional force. If war was more present in the story – the world in which Saint-Exupéry wrote it, after all, and a theme in Morpurgo’s work – you could almost imagine Morpurgo having written it himself.

Then again, as Morpurgo notes, there is something incontrovertibly French about The Little Prince , even as it appeals across the world. Saint-Exupéry isn’t afraid of suggesting an inherent sadness in the world, or of pointing to the meaningless lives so many lead. “People never have the time to understand anything that is worthwhile,” a fox laments. “They buy everything ready made in the shops. That’s why people don’t have friends, because they can’t buy friends in the shops.” The story’s wisdom on loneliness – in cities crowded with people – and consumerism – in a world replete with natural joys – remains as resonant as ever. Morpurgo’s translation reminds us why.

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The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry | Book Review

Book Review of The Little Prince The Children’s Book Review

The Little Prince

Written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Age Range:   10+

Paperback: 98 pages

ISBN: 978-1949998641

Publisher:  Harcourt (1943)

What to expect: Fantasy, Adventure, and Friendship

The Little Prince  is a book that has been translated into English from the French language. The author, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, was a pilot. Similarly to the pilot in his story, while flying a mission during World War II, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s plane was shot down, and it disappeared somewhere over the Mediterranean.

The Little Prince is an honest and beautiful story about loneliness, friendship, sadness, and love. The prince is a small boy from a tiny planet (an asteroid to be precise), who travels the universe, planet-to-planet, seeking wisdom. On his journey, he discovers the unpredictable nature of adults. “All grown-ups were once children… but only a few of them remember it.”

The story begins on Earth with the narrator—a crashed pilot stranded in the Sahara Desert, who is trying hard to repair his wrecked plane. One day a little boy, oddly dressed, shows up out of nowhere and insists that the pilot draw him a sheep. The pilot obeys this odd request, which strangely enough leads to the pilot learning more about the Little Prince and where he came from. What unfolds is a marvelous story that some will deem happy and some will find sad. Either way, all readers will have their minds opened wide and will hopefully grow up to be adults that will always remember they were once children, too.

The Little Prince  is a thin book with its mere ninety-eight pages, but don’t be fooled; it’s a brilliant book meant to be deeply thought about and to encourage you to build castles in the air.

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About the Author

ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY, the “Winged Poet,” was born in Lyon, France, in 1900. A pilot at twenty-six, he was a pioneer of commercial aviation and flew in the Spanish Civil War and World War II. His writings include The Little Prince, Wind, Sand and Stars, Night Flight, Southern Mail, and Airman’s Odyssey. In 1944, while flying a reconnaissance mission for his French air squadron, he disappeared over the Mediterranean

The Little Prince , written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry , was reviewed by Bianca Schulze. Discover more books like The Little Prince by following along with our reviews and articles tagged with Adventure , Antoine de Saint-Exupery , Classics , Fantasy , Friendship , and Middle Grade Books .

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Bianca Schulze is the founder of The Children’s Book Review. She is a reader, reviewer, mother and children’s book lover. She also has a decade’s worth of experience working with children in the great outdoors. Combined with her love of books and experience as a children’s specialist bookseller, the goal is to share her passion for children’s literature to grow readers. Born and raised in Sydney, Australia, she now lives with her husband and three children near Boulder, Colorado.

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A Star to Steer By

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By Dan Kois

• Nov. 5, 2010

You know the Little Prince, of course: the golden hair and ruddy cheeks, the long scarf trailing in the Sahara wind, all familiar from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s beloved 1943 parable. But what about the pilot? Saint-Exupéry made sketches of the narrator of “The Little Prince,” but the airman — whose crash-landing gives the Prince’s planet­-hopping philosophical adventures their frame — never makes an appearance in the book’s final version.

The pilot finally is seen in the French cartoonist Joann Sfar’s thoughtful new comics adaptation of “The Little Prince,” which has been gracefully translated by Sarah Ardizzone. And his appearance is the key to what makes this graphic novel not only a charming diversion but a new way of looking at a classic. With his arched eyebrows and receding hairline, Sfar’s pilot is a ringer for Saint-Exupéry himself.

“The Little Prince” has always been regarded as a psychological self-portrait of the daring aviator and author — who wrote it in New York, despairing of his marriage, despondent at the French surrender, desperate to return to the air. (He had been grounded by the Allies for one too many plane mishaps.) And he cast his wife as the fickle, demanding rose, who vexes the Little Prince as much as Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry vexed Antoine.

Sfar is a major cartoonist in a country that really values cartoonists. In America he’s best known for the graphic novel “The Rabbi’s Cat” and the “Dungeon” adventure comedy series. Sfar’s illustrations at times mirror Saint-Exupéry’s own — several denizens of outer asteroids could almost have been lifted straight from his sketchbook — but the Prince himself is shorter and squatter than you remember him, with bigger eyes. Less like an icon, and more like a real kid.

Indeed, Sfar’s comic may well appeal to real kids more than the original does. Its philosophical pronouncements, while wise as ever, are gently embedded in the story rather than acting as punctuation marks on each short chapter. Sfar transforms Saint-Exupéry’s voice — still a bit stuffy for kids, a bit snide for adults — into a living person, who dearly loves his Little Prince. (One effective sequence, invented by Sfar, has the Prince leaping from atop the plane in a joyous somersault to play with a delighted Saint-Exupéry.)

Thus the Prince’s protracted night-time goodbye at the end is newly touching, and harrowing, in Sfar’s book in a way it’s never felt in the original. And the boy’s prediction — that after he disappears into the desert the pilot will forever hear his laughter in the stars — comes on a lovely page on which the Prince himself glows brightly before the gloomy Saint-Exupéry. “When you’re feeling better (we always find consolation in the end) you’ll be glad you knew me,” the Prince says. “You’ll always be my friend.” I’ve always loved that evocative parenthetical, but I love it more when the shining boy who delivers it touches his friend’s shoulder with a tiny hand.

For children, Sfar’s comic represents an excellent point of entry for a well-known work. For grown-ups, it serves as an ode to the author who brought the Little Prince into the world just a year before he, too, disappeared, gone without a trace. Before the war’s end, Saint-Exupéry found a way to fly again, and plunged with his Lockheed P-38 into the sea off the coast of Marseille less than a month before the liberation of Paris. Reading Sfar’s version of his most enduring tale, we are reminded that Saint-Exupéry, like the Prince facing the snake, returned willingly to meet his end.

As part of its richly imagined conclusion, Sfar’s adaptation places us in the cockpit of his P-38 at night. The pilot smiles sadly to himself. The stars surround the plane, as joyous and alive as the Prince promised they would be. His plane skims the waves, which look, in this clever and wondrous retelling, just like the starlit sands of the Sahara.

THE LITTLE PRINCE

Written and illustrated by Joann Sfar

Translated by Sarah Ardizzone

Adapted from the book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

110 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $19.99. (Ages 10 and up)

Dan Kois is the author of “Facing Future,” about the musician Israel Kamakawiwo’ole.

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Book Review: The Little Prince

Today’s book review will be on ‘The Little Prince’ by Antoine De Saint- Exupéry. Growing up as a child this was one of my favourite books with a very important life lesson to learn.

‘The little prince’ tells the story of a pilot stranded in the desert fixing his aeroplane, until one day he meets a little boy – the Little Prince. The Little Prince tells the pilot many stories of his magical journey from his little planet and of his encounters with different grown-ups. The story focuses on how grown-ups are only interested in figures or matters of very little importance in life, in which the Little Prince cannot understand. The story highlights how most grown-ups miss out on the simple things in life, such as friendship, love and the beauty of the world because they are too occupied with gaining wealth and power. They are tricked into believing that figures or having money is important, but their life has no meaning.

What I like most about ‘The Little Prince’ is the key message of:

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

It teaches the reader that it is important to look beneath the surface to truly understand something, which most people fail to do as they are only interested in the face-value of something, as demonstrated at the very beginning of the story. This is a very important message for any child or grown-up to understand, in which the book demonstrates very beautifully.

The story writing itself is kept very simple with no rhythm or rhyme, but the imagination and maturity of the story keeps the reader interested. Along with the use of drawings by the author to help the reader visualise some things which may be unfamiliar. Not everyone knows what ‘Baobabs’ are?

Overall I would recommend ‘The Little Prince’ to all children over the age of 8, as younger readers may fail to understand certain words or the key message being portrayed. They may also find the book too serious, lacking any fun or humour, while older readers will definitely appreciate the beautiful message in this old tale.

Final Book Ratings:

Imagination: 9/10

Illustrations: 7/10

Writing: 6/10

Message: 10/10

Overall Rating: 8/10

You can purchase your copy of ‘The Little Prince’ from Amazon or borrow a copy from your local library.

Marty the wizard is the master of Imagine Forest. When he's not reading a ton of books or writing some of his own tales, he loves to be surrounded by the magical creatures that live in Imagine Forest. While living in his tree house he has devoted his time to helping children around the world with their writing skills and creativity.

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Themes and Analysis

The little prince, by antoine de saint-exupery.

‘The Little Prince’ is a story with lots of interesting characters. In fact, we learn a lot from every character- how to or how not to behave; what to, and what not to focus on.

About the Book

Article written by Chioma Julie

Degree in M.C.M. Awarded Best Graduating Student in Literature-in-English at UNISEC.

‘ The Little Prince ‘ tells the story of a boy- now a young man, who crashes into a desert, where he meets an interesting personality- the little prince, from whom he learns a great deal.

This work of art contains so many powerful themes. What you will find here are just some of them, the ones flexible enough to accommodate what would otherwise have come as subthemes. Some of them include friendship, finding joy in nature, the beauty in simplicity, amongst others.

Friendship requires a great deal of understanding. It is a major theme in the book. We see this in the fox’s relationship with the little prince. We see it equally, or even more, in the boy’s relationship with the little prince. Creating ties with people comes with consequences and rewards.

Consequences, because people come and go. In the same way, the fox makes the little prince tame him and then becomes sad when the little prince has to go away. Rewards because of the memories. Just like the fox would look at the fields with the golden-colored shrubs, and remember his good friend, the little prince, the same way the little prince, through that friendship, starts to appreciate the little things he has, which in fact, aren’t so little- his beautiful flower which he tamed, and which has become his friend, just like the fox. Indeed, these are incomparable to the other ‘big’ things, because they are his. Big in quotes , because that is very debatable.

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: it is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

The fox, indeed, thought the little prince a great deal.

The Deceptiveness of Adulthood

This is a major theme in the book. The story starts in a funny way, with the book dedicated, not to the adult who wrote it, but to the child who grew into that adult, a plea, presented in a funny way, but nonetheless, a plea. The grown-ups in the book think they know it all, that they know what the matters of consequence are, and what aren’t matters of consequence. Adults are seen as people who are wiser, or who should be, at least, because of the experiences time that age must have made them go through. Alas, the children in the book- the boy and the little prince , are much wiser than the adults, and are the ones who focus on what matters, knowing that the shell is only well… just a shell. At some point, the boy begins to use his two drawings- one, of the boa constrictor from the outside and two, of the boa constrictor from the inside, as the yardstick to ascertain which adult has or lacks understanding. Grown-ups aren’t all that, after all. In fact, they aren’t much, even.

The beauty in simplicity. What you need, is right here, not far away. The grown-ups in the book see simple things as trivialities. But to the children who really understand things and know what matters, the simple things matter as much, if not even more. The shell which the little prince talks about can be seen as the big thing, the things we see, the conspicuous things. But, what about what’s on the inside? The little prince learns a great deal from the fox. He learns simplicity and learns that what matters is not quantity, and that- that something has so many others that look like it physically, doesn’t mean much. What matters is what you have, being yours, being unique- to you, and that is simple. Simplicity in its purest form. Simplicity is seeing the boa constrictor as a boa constrictor, not some hat. Simplicity is knowing that the boa constrictors matter as much as golf does. Simplicity is choosing to reject the pill that prevents people from going thirsty, only to look foolish in the end, because, why would someone take the pill, and then end up spending the time saved, by the freshwater spring?

Curiosity and Proactiveness

Start early to nip potentially problematic things in the board before they become uncontrollable, just like one would, the baobabs. As the curtains are about to draw to a close, the boy continues to express his worries, which usually come in waves- that perhaps, the sheep finally ate the flower. Most times, worrying is unnecessary as it changes nothing. However, a little of it can help keep people on their toes. The boy is a tad bit on the high side, but curiosity does not always kill the cat. In fact, even if we are to run with that, satisfaction would most likely bring it back.

We see proactiveness and curiosity in the little prince. The first thing he asks the boy is to draw him a sheep. Then he remembers his flower and asks to know if sheep eat flowers- curiosity. He then goes on to make the boy draw something to protect his flowers, a muzzle. He also intends to remove the baobabs before they sprout and become uncontrollable. Proactiveness and curiosity help the little prince to achieve a lot, and this rubs off on the boy.

Finding joy in nature. The little prince finds joy in watching the sunset. Do not wait to be happy; just be, live in the moment, and enjoy the moment. It is amazing that something as beautiful as a flower would have thorns. The thorns are for protection. Nature is indeed fascinating to observe. You cannot play the role of an enemy to nature and have it easy. That simply complicates things. Nature and everything that is of it and in it- the vegetation, the waters, the stars, the imaginary sheep, the fox, the snake, the flowers, the beings, all in the story extend to all of us. Nature is refreshing. In the novel, children are more in tune with nature, more positively curious, and are the ones who know what they want, not the grown-ups who don’t even know why they are going where they are heading to; that is why they- the children- understand.

Pride in what you have. Contentment. Aim high, but appreciate the one(s) you have, while doing so. Contentment and ambition, or a healthy desire to achieve or acquire more, can coexist. This is a major lesson the little prince learns from the fox. When the little prince sees that his flower, his beautiful flower, unlike what he thought, has thousands more that look like her physically, it saddens him. Now he thinks his flower isn’t unique after all. He climbs the mountains with shafts. This makes him remember his three volcanoes, one of which is probably dead, or well on its way to dying. This saddens him. The fox makes him snap out of that sour mood, by reminding him that what is on the inside matters, and that what is his, is his, unique- to him, no matter how little they appear to be. What we think are the big things, the grande things, are not really all that, after all. The little prince becomes proud of his possessions, once again.

Writing Style and Tone in The Little Prince

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry makes use of simple sentence structure while crafting this piece. He writes in English of the modern times. Also, the vocabulary is quite simple, and one well-footed in the English Language, need not turn to the dictionary so many times, as that might become a complete turn-off. Simplicity in language is a key ingredient in communication. The author does well to key into that.

The tone used in ‘ The Little Prince ’ is conversational and friendly. It almost feels like one knows the narrator personally, from somewhere else, other than the book. The writer tells the story in such a way that the reader lives, not outside, but within the book, while reading. It makes the reader more empathetic, the tone. The author also employs a simple structure, generally- he uses simple paragraphing, with most chapters out of the 27, succinct. He also makes use of illustrations- drawings- to go just beyond telling the reader, to show the reader how good or not, an artist, the boy is.

Analysis of Symbols and Figurative Language in The Little Prince

The story of ‘ The Little Prince ’ is a book filled with lots of figurative expressions. In the book, there is also a significant number of things with much deeper meanings than they literally appear to have. Also, personification and irony as figures of speech are very dominant in the book. First, we will focus on the analysis of symbols, and then we will talk about figurative language in ‘ The Little Prince .’

Analysis of Symbols

Here, we will take a look at a few things from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s ‘ The Little Prince ’ and their underlying meanings.

The Box Containing the Sheep

This goes beyond just a box (believed to have a sheep in it). This signifies the power of choice. One can be anything one wants to be as long as one is living well within one’s own rights. In terms of money, it is the equivalent of giving someone a blank cheque. That box- that power of choice, though it is more of a cage for the sheep than it is liberty, gives the little prince the freedom to choose how he would want his sheep to look. The power of choice cannot be overemphasized. It is the type of power that makes non-existent, what would have been a problem, and makes the already existing problem fizzle out.

The Baobabs

A symbol of trouble and is, therefore, better handled before it escalates. See anything that brings problems as the baobabs. That way, you weed them out before they sprout and become uncontrollable. Ignorance and vanity are baobabs, and the large bulk of the responsibility lies with the people around those plagued by this to help them out. For sometimes, sick people do not even know that they are sick. Potential troubles are to be nipped in the board before they escalate, bloom, blow up, or become much more difficult to control, the same with baobabs.

The Beautiful Flower with Four Thorns

A symbol of delicateness. How the little prince handles it shows how delicate it is. The beautiful flower symbolizes our love for anything at all. When one loves something, it shows in how that thing is tended to by them.

The outer part. The shell symbolizes what we can see, the obvious or conspicuous things. Size, quantity- basically, physicality, even outer beauty are all shells. And as much as shells may matter, they do not matter more than what is on the inside- the inner being, the inner beauty or the lack thereof, the appearance within, the heart, and the thought. In fact, the latter should matter more- that is, to the ones who try to know, to tame, and to understand.

The stars symbolize a beacon of hope. The star is good, and good is the star. We can make our joyful memories stars, so that when we look up at the sky we smile again and again, we laugh, even. No, that is not crazy. And, stars can be found anywhere, not just in the sky.

Figurative Language

We will focus on the two figures of speech dominant in the book (irony and personification)- in action or words or both.

It is ironic that the adults who are thought to be wise aren’t as sensible after all.

Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.

The little chap’s words.

It is also ironic that the king, who believes he is lord over all things- living and nonliving- has to wait for a favorable time to show the prince the sunset. That is beyond his control, and in fact, he isn’t lord over much as his lordship barely extends outside of him, the king hungry for a subject.

It is ironic that people would take pills to make them not become thirsty for a while, a week maybe, and then spend the minutes saved by a spring of fresh water.

“It is very tedious work, but very easy,” says the little prince about removing the baobabs when they are still small, making sure you don’t mistake them for the rose bushes. How can something be tedious and easy at the same time? This could very easily be mistaken for an oxymoron. But it is an irony.

Personification

Referring to a flower as she/her in Chapter 8.

She did not wish to go out into the world all rumpled, like the field poppies. It was only in the full radiance of her beauty that she wished to appear. Oh, yes! She was a coquettish creature! And her mysterious adornment lasted for days and days.

The little prince also converses with the proud flower as if it were a person. “Oh! How beautiful you are!” “Am I not?” the flower responded, sweetly. “And I was born at the same moment as the sun,” added the flower. The fox is also personified in Chapter 21.

What major lesson do we learn from The Little Prince ?

We can learn many lessons from ‘ The Little Prince ,’ but summarised- we should get our priorities right, stop focusing so much on the shell, and the aesthetics, and start focusing more on the heart, what’s on the inside. Why? Because what is on the inside would almost always matter more than what is on the outside. When the shell disappears, what is left? That is what matters.

What is the biggest realization from The Little Prince ?

The biggest realization from ‘ The Little Prince ‘ is that oftentimes, children are more in tune with what should actually matter than grown-ups are. A good example is the scene at the train station. All the children seemed to know where they are going and what they are going there to do. But, the grown-ups appear to be totally disconnected from reality and out of tune with nature.

What is the central theme of The Little Prince ?

It’s not quite easy to choose, but summarised, ‘ The Little Prince ‘ teaches us about friendship – how friends are loved, and how we ought to prioritize them because we are meant to prioritize what we love. Friendship is the central theme. Though all connected, other notable themes are proactiveness, curiosity, pride in what is yours, and so on.

How are baobabs used in The Little Prince ?

The baobabs are used to symbolize potentially troubling things that should be controlled before they become uncontrollable. The baobabs represent danger. When they are small, they represent potentially dangerous things. When they sprout or matter, they represent, not danger that is about to come, but one that is already here. Then, things got out of hand and would become difficult to control.

What does the shell symbolize?

The shell symbolizes the aesthetics, the outer part, the part we can see and quantify or place a value on. In the book, the fox makes the little prince realize that beauty lies in what is on the inside much more than it does in what is on the outside. When the shell is gone, what is left? What is left is important, because it is what matters.

What is the most ironic thing in the book?

The most ironic thing in the book is that adults, the very ones who are expected to know better because of… well, a wealth of experiences (or the impression that those exist), are the ones with their list of priorities upside down. A good example of irony in the book is grown-ups downing pills to save them some time by ‘preventing’ them from getting thirsty, only to wish to spend that time by a freshwater spring. Things couldn’t get more ironic than this.

What do the baobabs symbolise?

The baobabs symbolize trouble- potentially dangerous things that should be nipped in the board before they sprout and cause havoc. The baobabs, when they just begin to develop, scream ‘danger,’ symbolizing things that should be dealt with or handled before they become uncontrollable. Procrastination would mean disaster.

How was the fox personified in The Little Prince ?

A fox could communicate in a human language. A fox cannot hold a conversation with a person. That is as far as personification can go. We learn a lot from the personified horse. It is from this fox that the little prince learns to love all he has, no matter how little he thinks them to be. It is also from the fox that the little prince learns the value of friendship above all, and that what lies within would almost always be greater than what lies without.

About Chioma Julie

Chioma is a graduate from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. She has a passion for music, movies, and books. Occasionally, she writes to unwind.

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Julie, Chioma " The Little Prince Themes and Analysis 📖 " Book Analysis , https://bookanalysis.com/antoine-de-saint-exupery/the-little-prince/themes-analysis/ . Accessed 15 April 2024.

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Books: A true story

Book reviews and some (mostly funny) true stories of my life.

Book Review: The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery

August 25, 2017 By Jessica Filed Under: Book Review 2 Comments

The Little Prince

Moral allegory and spiritual autobiography, The Little Prince is the most translated book in the French language. With a timeless charm it tells the story of a little boy who leaves the safety of his own tiny planet to travel the universe, learning the vagaries of adult behaviour through a series of extraordinary encounters. His personal odyssey culminates in a voyage to Earth and further adventures.

Reading The Little Prince was such a strange experience.  It’s delightful.  It’s funny.  It’s adorable.  The almost condescending attitude towards adults and the jokes at their expense makes this book appealing to kids since they can relate to being baffled by grown-ups.  But as I’m laughing at the crazy adults and the crazy things they do, I had to stop for a second as it sank in that I do those crazy things, too.  I found myself reflecting at the deeper story behind this prince and his cute travels to different planets.  The little prince’s complete bewilderment at the behavior of adults challenged the way I think in so many ways.  And boy do I love a story that challenges my thinking.

Here’s one that blew my mind – if sheep eat flowers with the thorns, then what good are thorns?  I HAVE NO IDEA.  My instinct is to explain evolution or genetics.  But that’s not the question.  The thorns don’t do any good and I hadn’t realized that.  Maybe as adults we simply stop questioning things because now we know science and math and stuff and we assume there’s nothing left to learn.  I do have a lot left to learn.  I need to figure out why plants have thorns.

The little prince describes grown-ups as loving numbers and asking questions to get to know someone where the answers are numbers instead of questions about things that matter (like getting to know their personality).  To prove the little prince is right, here’s a numbered list of the types of adults he meets on each planet:

• The King – talks about his control and power, but the little prince clearly sees that it’s just an illusion since he commands things under the “science of government, until conditions are favorable. (pg 31)” Or, when they were going to do it anyway.
• The Vain Man – wants nothing more than to be admired constantly.  The little prince wonders “…what is there about my admiration that interests you so much? (pg 34).”
• The Drunkard – the vicious cycle of shame.  He’s ashamed that he drinks so he drinks to forget his shame. The prince has literally nothing to say about that.
• The Business Man – endlessly counts all the stars and says he owns them and they make him rich. The little prince sees that work should be a two-way street. “But you’re not useful to the stars. (pg 40)”
• The Lamp Lighter – stuck in the endless cycle of chores. He is a hard worker and the little prince likes him since his job is useful to others, but the little prince doesn’t understand why he can’t rest and enjoy the many joys (like sunsets) that his planet has.
• The Geographer – never actually goes anywhere. He writes about places and discoveries that other people have made.  He’s the kind of adult that never fully lives their life.
• Earth – the last planet he visits that has a combination of all these grown-ups (which he numbers to please the adults).

I think I relate the most to the lamp lighter.  I get stuck in the daily grind of things.  Who do you relate to the most?

My favorite thing about the little prince is his view of love.  The time you spend caring for something is what makes it important to you.  A huge rose garden is not as meaningful as the one rose you took care of.  Like the fox said, don’t forget this truth:

“One sees clearly only with the heart.  Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.” -Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince pg 63

Book Review of The Little Prince on a Post-it

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We read The Little Prince for book club and out host gave out these roses with a quote from the book attached.  I had to share it since it was such a clever and fitting gift for the book.

About Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born in Lyons on June 29, 1900. He flew for the first time at the age of twelve, at the Ambérieu airfield, and it was then that he became determined to be a pilot. He kept that ambition even after moving to a school in Switzerland and while spending summer vacations at the family's château at Saint-Maurice-de-Rémens, in eastern France. (The house at Saint-Maurice appears again and again in Saint-Exupéry's writing.)

Later, in Paris, he failed the entrance exams for the French naval academy and, instead, enrolled at the prestigious art school l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1921 Saint-Exupéry began serving in the military, and was stationed in Strasbourg. There he learned to be a pilot, and his career path was forever settled.

After leaving the service, in 1923, Saint-Exupéry worked in several professions, but in 1926 he went back to flying and signed on as a pilot for Aéropostale, a private airline that flew mail from Toulouse, France, to Dakar, Senegal. In 1927 Saint-Exupéry accepted the position of airfield chief for Cape Juby, in southern Morocco, and began writing his first book, a memoir called Southern Mail, which was published in 1929. He then moved briefly to Buenos Aires to oversee the establishment of an Argentinean mail service; when he returned to Paris in 1931, he published Night Flight, which won instant success and the prestigious Prix Femina.

Always daring, Saint-Exupéry tried in 1935 to break the speed record for flying from Paris to Saigon. Unfortunately, his plane crashed in the Libyan desert, and he and his copilot had to trudge through the sand for three days to find help. In 1938 he was seriously injured in a second plane crash, this time as he tried to fly between New York City and Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. The crash resulted in a long convalescence in New York.

Saint-Exupéry's next novel, Wind, Sand and Stars, was published in 1939. A great success, the book won the Académie Française's Grand Prix du Roman (Grand Prize for Novel Writing) and the National Book Award in the United States. At the beginning of the Second World War, Saint-Exupéry flew reconnaissance missions for France, but he went to New York to ask the United States for help when the Germans occupied his country. He drew on his wartime experiences to write Flight to Arras and Letter to a Hostage, both published in 1942. His classic The Little Prince appeared in 1943. Later in 1943 Saint-Exupéry rejoined his French air squadron in northern Africa. Despite being forbidden to fly (he was still suffering physically from his earlier plane crashes), Saint-Exupéry insisted on being given a mission. On July 31, 1944, he set out from Borgo, Corsica, to overfly occupied France. He never returned.

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• Classics Club

August 27, 2017 at 8:16 am

I read this a long time ago, but I remember really enjoying the wimzy. Maybe I should re-read.

November 16, 2017 at 1:20 pm

I’ve read The Little Prince for the first time when I was in the elementary school and I remember the teacher advising us to read this story again in a few years because we would look at it from a completely different perspective… I have read it 3 times in my life and every time I interpret it in a different way, amazing book.

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The Little Prince

By antoine de saint-exupery.

• The Little Prince Summary

The narrator, a pilot, crash-lands his plane in the Sahara desert. While he tries to repair his engine and monitor his dwindling supply of water and food, a little boy appears out of nowhere and simply asks him to draw a sheep. The author then learns that this "little prince" comes from the far away Asteroid B-612, where he left a rose and three volcanoes.

The prince’s most prized possession was the rose, but her tempestuous mien and fickleness tired him and he decided to leave his tiny planet. To his surprise, the flower was visibly sad to see him go, but she urged him on nonetheless.

Before arriving on Earth, the prince visited other planets and met with strange individuals: a king, a vain man, a drunkard, a lamplighter, and a geographer. At the geographer’s suggestion, he visited Earth but dropped down into the Sahara Desert. He found no friends there, but a snake told him that if he ever needed to return to his home planet, he could take advantage of the snake’s bite. He met a fox that taught him to realize that to know others we must “tame” them; this is what makes things and people unique. "The essential is invisible to the eye," says the fox.

The narrator grows to love and cherish the small boy, marveling at how fragile he seems though he adopts a serious air. He and the boy find a well and drink from it, which saves the narrator’s life, but he later, right as he is about to joyfully tell the prince he's fixed his engine, happens upon the prince talking to a yellow snake about poison. The plan is for the prince to reunite with his rose, but this is utterly devastating to the narrator. Nevertheless, the boy lets the snake bite him and falls over into the sand. The narrator cannot find his body the next day so he hopes that the boy is not dead.

The narrator returns to his life but always wonders about the prince and hopes he returns. He asks readers to let him know if they ever meet the prince.

The Little Prince Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Little Prince is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Who is the inhabitant of The Little Prince's shortest visit?

The inhabitant is a conceited man.

Why does the little girl have the jar of pennies?

I see no evidence of a little girl with a jar of pennies or coins in the text.... chapter?

Fully describe the appearance of the Little Prince.

The Little Prince was a little man with golden hair. He wore a blue jacket with burgandy lapels and cuffs, golden stars attached to his soldiers, knee-high blue boots, and he carried a sword.

Study Guide for The Little Prince

The Little Prince study guide contains a biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Little Prince
• Character List

Essays for The Little Prince

The Little Prince essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

• Disguised Imperfections: Human Nature in "The Little Prince," "The Mirror Maker," and "The Nose"
• Matters of Consequence in "The Little Prince": Comparing Childhood and Adulthood

Lesson Plan for The Little Prince

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to The Little Prince
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• The Little Prince Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for The Little Prince

• Introduction
• Tone and writing style
• Inspirations

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Book Review: The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery

There are few books in the world literature legacy that equally satisfy the tastes of both children and adults. One of the first masterpieces that come to mind is probably The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. This charming story takes the reader on an engaging trip all over the universe; a trip that results in fascinating discoveries and helps to realize true values. Adventures that happen during this intergalactic space investigation keep young readers’ eyes glued to the pages of the book, whereas the novella’s hidden meaning attracts a grown-up audience. For this reason, it is impossible to classify The Little Prince as children’s literature or adult literature: the book sends a relevant message to the readers of both age groups. Moreover, each generation extracts important lessons from the story. Below you will find a review of the book that will help you uncover all the secrets of this charming story.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and The Little Prince history

A wonderful book is usually a product of an extraordinary writer. The author of The Little Prince was truly that kind of man: adventurous, courageous, hopelessly in love with flying. Having turned his lifelong passion into a full-time job, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry quickly became known as a remarkable French military pilot who delivered mail across continents. His thrilling and sometimes dangerous trips over the Sahara Desert and the Andes found their display in The Aviator (1926), Southern Mail (1929), Wind, Sand and Stars (1939).

The latter is centered around a horrible autobiographical event: Saint Exupéry’s hazardous attempt to break the speed record, which led to the plane crash in the Sahara Desert. Together with his navigator, he got stuck between life and death with almost no food or water. Their struggle ended thanks to Bedouin coming by and finding them desperately exhausted, dehydrated and hallucinating after four days in a desert. Probably, that accident inspired the setting of The Little Prince : the Sahara Desert, plane crash and its pilot left in the middle of nowhere.

Not only the setting but also the ending of the novella alludes to mysterious events from the author’s past: Saint-Exupéry left our world silently, without any explanation. He literally vanished without a trace. During World War II, he left occupied France and joined French Air Force, flying reconnaissance missions. In 1940 he traveled to the US and had to stay there for long 27 months. For this reason, his magnum opus was published far away from his Motherland.

When was The Little Prince written? It happened in 1942 in Long Island, NY, USA. Silvia Hamilton, his friend, was handed a real treasure: the author’s manuscript and his own watercolor drawings stained with coffee and holed with cigarette burns. The Little Prince illustrations together with original manuscripts were exhibited in the Morgan Library & Museum in New York to honor the story’s 70th anniversary.

Triple genre of The Little Prince

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry skillfully combined the features of three different literature genres, so The Little Prince is considered to be a mix of parable, allegory, and fable. As a parable, it holds significant moral value to the readers, fulfilling a didactic function. Moral lessons about relationship, responsibility, and commitment aim to teach the audience rather than merely entertain.

Being an allegory, the story conveys two meanings: a literal one and a figurative one. Basically, a reader is presented with a story of unexpected travel experiences of a weird boy. However, every event and every dialogue in a book holds deep symbolism and hidden meaning.

Finally, The Little Prince is also a fable, since the author grants inanimate objects the ability to speak and think. Both animals and plants reflect human characters, which appears to be captivating for kids, making the process of reading a pleasure for them. This is why the book is so popular among all age groups: kids perceive it as a story with a thrilling plot, whereas older readers think deeper and try to recognize the core essence of allegories and symbols, enjoying ‘decoding’ the treasures hidden in verbal images.

The Little Prince characters

The story demonstrates an incredibly deep gap between childhood and mature age, illustrating how differently kids and adults perceive life. It is best revealed through the dialogues of two main characters who share their adventures. Apart from them, there are other characters of minor importance, each serving as embodiment of some remarkable feature. So, minor characters from a relevant background help the main hero to grasp the real state of things, hence contributing to the general concept of the story. The Little Prince characters analysis emphasizes the purity of children as opposed to weird and often wrong principles of the adults.

The Narrator

He lands his plane in the desert due to an engine trouble. While repairing it, he encounters a pale boy with curly gold hair who approaches him with a request to draw a sheep. The Narrator then shows him his own childhood drawing of a boa eating an elephant. When he was a kid, adults could never guess what he meant by that sketch and insisted on him quitting drawing. Surprisingly, the curly boy immediately understands the inner meaning. Such an extraordinary acquaintance initiates friendship between these two heroes. Later on, the Narrator feels a strong bond that ties him with his little friend, reminding him of a sincere, naive, optimistic world of childhood and its real values.

The Little Prince

The curly boy was given the name “the Little Prince” by the narrator. He comes from a distant Asteroid B-612 and considers this star to be his home for which he bears full responsibility. The boy takes care of his own little planet grubbing up harmful baobab roots and cleaning out three tiny volcanoes in order to prevent eruptions. Above all, his mind and heart belong to a Rose that once appeared on his planet. She is far too arrogant and demanding, so the Prince comes to the point when he cannot stand her anymore, though he still deeply loves her. He sets off on a long trip investigating five nearby planets aiming to find answers to eternal life questions. Finally, the boy visits the Earth and makes friends with the Narrator. The man becomes the one who is honored with the Little Prince’s trust. Therefore, two of them ponder over the essence of life based on their mutually shared experience. The Little Prince then feels it is high time to come back to his Rose and protect her again. Even though he prepares to leave the Narrator, he wants to be remembered: every time the Narrator looks at the starry sky, he is reminded of the Prince and their friendship.

He is the one who teaches the Little Prince the most valuable lesson: essential things can only be seen by heart, not eyes. That explains everything to the main hero, including his relationship with his Rose. The Fox asks the Prince to tame him as ‘taming’ means surrounding someone with love, kindness, and appreciation.

Being the Little Prince’s property and totally depending on him, she behaves as if she is a master, and the Prince should please her. The Rose claims to be absolutely unique and the most beautiful ever, so everyone must adore her peculiarity. In fact, she is intolerable, capricious, and naughty, which makes her owner exhausted. The Rose represents the woman who is hard to love but whose vulnerability and grace irresistibly attracts others.

The King on Asteroid B-325

Having a rat as his only subordinate, the King assures the Little Prince in his almightiness and power. He believes that even the sun obeys his orders when rising and setting down. The King treats the Little Prince as his new subordinate which seems fairly ridiculous for the latter who sees nothing in such a man but the mindless desire to rule in the adults’ world.

The Conceited on Asteroid B-326

Being the only inhabitant on his small planet, he expects everyone to acknowledge his grandeur in beauty and intellect. Since there is no one to do that, he permanently praises himself. Consequently, the Little Prince realizes how presumptuous and self-centered the adults can be.

The Drunkard on Asteroid B 327

The man keeps drinking in order to forget the shame he feels about being a drunkard. He does not have any aims in life and lives each day in the likewise manner. The Little Prince finds out that he cannot help the desperate man, and leaves with the persuasion of how discouraged and depressed people may become if they lack any inner strength and wish for changes.

The Businessman on Asteroid B-328

Spending busy days and nights counting stars, he considers to be the owner of them. The man does not have any time to think whether dedicating his life to such a business makes sense. The Little Prince tries to persuade him that owning something means doing some favor to others, just as he does to his Rose. However, the man cannot comprehend such ideas, and the Prince leaves, disappointed at adults’ obsession and wrong standards.

The Street Lamp Lighter on Asteroid B-329

As the sunset comes, he lights the lamps on his planet. Day by day, he is doing the same job. With the pace of time, the asteroid’s turning speed is increasing, leaving the Lamp Lighter loaded with work. The Little Prince respects the efforts of this man, though adult’s life seems to be hopelessly busy and monotonous.

The Geographer on Asteroid B 330

His job is collecting important information about the world geography revealed by explorers. He does not bother to discover things on his own, but would rather wait for someone else’s news. The Little Prince is convinced that one should put efforts in order to get knowledge and wisdom, not merely sit and expect others to explain everything. As advised by the Geographer, the Prince decides to visit the Earth where he tells his adventures to the narrator. The diversity of characters in The Little Prince depicts the real world with various people, beliefs, ideas. The reader looks at the world through the eyes of the Little Prince and tries to comprehend together with him the way things should exist.

Themes in The Little Prince

The story depicts bright characters who assist in the reader’s decision-making process towards rediscovering life principles and values. Taking lessons from each episode enables the reader to distinguish important themes of the book, which are definitely worth attention. The key theme is the total contradiction between children’s and grown-ups’ perspectives of life. Sincerity, curiosity, passion, kindness inherent to kids are opposed to obsession, arrogance, apathy of the adults. The author manifests this theme with the help of other subsidiary ones:

• Necessity of enriching one’s knowledge vs. staying ignorant;
• Personal growth through new experiences;
• Acquiring wisdom through learning lessons from other people’s mistakes;
• Pursuit of true values in life;
• Meaningless waste of time;
• Dangers of self-concentration;
• Relationship equals responsibility;
• Love, friendship, and commitment;
• Realization of world’s narrow-mindedness and its impact on a person.
• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry raises core questions that need to be answered by everyone. Moreover, not only does he puzzle the audience with them but also prompts on the right decisions.

Analysis of the writing style of the author

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry developed his authentic writing style that can be surely recognized. The story is told from the first-person viewpoint: the narrator is an aviator who got lost in the desert. He lets the reader know only those things that he knows himself. The man recalls some of his childhood memories, then he gets acquainted with the Little Prince and describes their dialogues. Since the Prince appears to be an experienced traveler and adventure-lover, he cannot leave his adult friend without telling him valuable things he has recently learned. Therefore, the narrator listens more than he actually talks, focusing on the extraordinary collocutor.

The author’s tone of writing may be described as ‘mysterious and secret’. The Little Prince unexpectedly appears in the middle of the Sahara desert talking about interstellar travels; animals speak with riddles; asteroids lead their own lives with a single man on each of them; the Little Prince miraculously disappears and no one knows where and how to find him. In addition, the entire story is centered around finding answers to life mysteries that cannot be completely comprehended.

Together with the writing itself, the original book contains Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s illustrations that complete the narration. Such a skillful technique makes the author’s writing style really unique.

The Little Prince literary devices

The masterly style demands a dexterous usage of literary devices. The Little Prince offers a variety of them:

• Allegory (literal and figurative, inner meaning: through the demonstration of the Prince’s travels the author shows the process of searching for life answers);
• Climax (the Fox shares his main secret with the Little Prince, which results in the boy’s decision to return to his Rose);
• Foreshadowing (the Prince asked the pilot what planet he belongs to, hinting that the story has something to do with planets, and the boy is not a usual one; the snake told the Prince that if he wanted to come back to his planet, he would need to get bitten by her);
• Imagery (engaging description of extraterrestrial worlds);
• Paradox (in the Prince’s opinion, adults should grow wiser with years, but they seem to be getting ignorant, so one has to explain every single detail to them);
• Personification (the Rose is pictured as a beautiful lady constantly dressing up and enjoying herself).

The Little Prince symbolism

Each character of the story is deeply symbolic. Moreover, even inanimate objects convey allegorical meanings. For instance, stars: the aviator navigates thanks to them, but when he meets the Little Prince, the stars acquire new meanings. When the Narrator looks up at the stars, he now knows they hold his dear friend and is reminded of eternal life mysteries and worlds not yet discovered. Therefore, stars stand for life secrets and hidden treasures.

• The desert symbol represents hostile place without means for life, just as the narrator’s state of mind at that time. The Little Prince’s optimism was like finding the well in the desert for the pilot – it guaranteed survival.
• The water symbol in The Little Prince describes the spiritual food necessary for one’s life. Like water nourishes a thirsty traveler’s body, spiritual fulfillment feeds our souls. The human spirit is what feels thirst the most, not our body. Moreover, people should not take things like a gulp of cool water for granted, but appreciate life in its details.
• Baobab trees in The Little Prince is another bright symbol in the story. Baobab seeds sprout and soon become fatal to the planet if they are not uprooted in time. The same happens with any harmful habit that leads to inevitable outcome if not given up before it’s too late.
• Planet symbolism lies in reminding us we are the only ones responsible for the well-being of our own little planets (aka lives). Each of us has a choice: whether to follow the Little Prince’s example and make the planet protected from dangerous ‘roots’, spread care, kindness, and love, or turn our life into a cramped space centered around egotistical desires, obsessive tasks, routine, spending time meaninglessly, like asteroid inhabitants.
• The narrator told the story of his parents discouraging him after he had drawn the picture of a snake eating elephant . Adults saw merely a hat while the child’s imagination pictured something much greater. People perceive things differently but if you have a dream, protect it from the discouragement by all means.
• The symbolism of fox manifests itself through a famous saying about responsibility and essence of things. The Fox is like a life teacher who once appears and impacts on the way one sees the world. In fact, the Fox did not say anything sophisticated. On the contrary, his wisdom lies in the simplicity: the only thing needed is to stop rushing and listen to what the heart speaks.
• The Prince symbol meaning is revealed in two dimensions: as a pure-hearted child with optimistic ideas who lives in his own positive bright world, and as an open-minded person who strives to lead meaningful life devoting himself to people around.

Thus, symbolism of The Little Prince is one of the book’s crucial features. Each reader may find more symbols or reveal new tints in the already mentioned ones. Symbols give us an opportunity to think critically, and this is exactly what attracts open-minded audience.

The Little Prince quotes

The Fox appeared in the story for a short while only but no other character expressed the core essence of the story as eloquently as he did. His advice to the Little Prince is quoted worldwide, “Here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” The Little Prince fox quotes cannot leave the reader indifferent, as they deal with the deepest spheres of human life. What the fox once said was later on repeated by the Little Prince and the narrator proving his true point of view:

• “It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
• “The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”
• “You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed.”
• “The eyes are blind. One must look with the heart.”
• “Only the children know what they are looking for.”
• “One runs the risk of weeping a little, if one lets oneself be tamed.”
• “No one is ever satisfied where he is.”

Books like The Little Prince deserve eternal acknowledgment and attention. As long as people refer to them, they make a pause in their busy lives in order to think about the most important things like love, responsibility, and life goals.

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Easy To Read: Book Reviews

Lester Murray Blog

Review of the book “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Author: Antoine de Saint-Exupery Book Title: The Little Prince

The Little Prince is a fabulous philosophical tale that in 1943 made the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery famous throughout the world. At one time, the book became a bestseller and was sold in 200 million copies worldwide. To date, it has been translated into 301 languages.

The story is based on a gripping story about a boy – the Little Prince, who decided to leave his home to see how other people live. The Little Prince lived on the asteroid B-612 and was engaged in everyday affairs there: he watched three volcanoes, weeded out weeds, looked after the beautiful Rose. He loved Rosa, but she seemed aloof, rude and cruel to him. Soon, the Little Prince began to feel very lonely and unhappy, so he decided to go on a trip to other planets.

Traveling through neighboring asteroids, the Little Prince meets rather strange people who live alone: ​​the King, the Ambitious, the Drunkard, the Business Man, the Lamplighter and the Geographer. The boy did not like all these people, they were indifferent, callous and greedy, and their life seemed to him boring, monotonous and empty.

Then the Little Prince flies to planet Earth. Unlike tiny asteroids, the Earth surprised him with its size and variety in everything. He hopes to learn a lot here. But, as it turned out later, people on Earth are not much different from those whom he met earlier. And only the Pilot, the Fox and the Snake liked the boy. The pilot, being a romantic, proved to the boy that not all adults have lost the ability to believe in miracles. Fox – taught friendship, responsibility, showed how important it is to value and protect loved ones. The Wise Snake explained that it is necessary to help each other in life, offering her help, suddenly the Little Prince wants to go back home. After a while, the boy really begins to miss his beloved Rose and his home planet, and, taking advantage of the Snake’s offer, returns home.

This book is very poignant, and will not leave indifferent both a child and an adult. Many philosophical themes are hidden in it, but, nevertheless, the main idea of ​​this story is how important, as an adult, not to lose the ability to look at life like a child, you need to enjoy simple things and be pure, naive and trusting, like Little Prince.

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The Little Prince Book Review

The Little Prince is a tale by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and it has been one of the most significant books to me since I was young. Its illustrations are colored richly and the book tells the story of the prince, who met a pilot lost in a desert. I found the book thrilling at the time since it made a lot of observations about human nature and life. For example, I used to be awed by the story of a fox that met the young prince while on his journey on earth (de Saint-Exupéry 23). The moral of the story is shown in the remark said by the fox: a person sees clearly with the heart rather than the eye (de Saint-Exupéry 23). I also learned that one has to become responsible for the one he or she has tamed. Although, The Little Prince has been an important book to me since my childhood, I perceive it differently now, as an adult.

I understood author’s unwillingness to grow up. The narrator’s confusion and feelings about the world of the grown up were always close to my own perception. Nevertheless, I have learned to appreciate the author’s message in another way and to see deep allegory in the world, described by him. This story gave me an unusual stand point about life now, when I’m a grown-up, and taught that not all things that adults do have sense. For instance, while the narration tells about different social structures, such as monarchy and capitalism, it also shows that people running them may be illogical and not concerned about the real problems of the world. In light of this, the The Little Prince is a different story from what I read when I was younger.

Works Cited

de Saint-Exupéry, Antoine. The little prince. Dramatic Publishing, 1998.

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Best Literature Essay Examples

The little prince essay.

1050 words | 4 page(s)

In the novella, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry_GoBack_GoBack, the author presents a fable in the form of a novella. The fable is a lesson for both adults and children. In the story, the children possess the wisdom, while the adults are foolish. This is seen in a series of events in which the children appreciate life around them while the adults fail to understand it. Only the children have the ability to use imagination; the adults have lost their imagination with adulthood. As a result, the children can see things as they truly are. The adults can only see things in a boring and dull manner. The novella is a fable which encourages adults to look beyond the dreariness of their lives. It is also a story that encourages children not to lose their gifts of imagination and wonder.

The novella tells the story of a young prince who has come to Earth from his home, an asteroid. Through the story, he engages in a series of adventures, including climbing the world’s highest mountain, correctly interpreting drawings, and sharing his stories about visiting other asteroids. The author utilizes these tales to express the strangeness of the adult world. In the adult world, they place no value on art. When the narrator discusses his attempts at drawing an elephant swallowed by a boa constrictor, the adults advise him “to lay aside my drawings of boa constrictors, whether from the inside or the outside, and to devote myself instead to geography, history, arithmetic and grammar: (de Saint-Exupery 2). They fail to appreciate the ability of the narrator to imagine this scenario. It is obviously impossible for a snake to eat an elephant. However, the narrator had the imagination to consider a world where the impossible happens. This is a gift the adults do not grasp.

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The narrator asks a series of adults to recognize what his drawing represents. Essentially, it represents the expansion of the world’s possibilities. However, all the adults see a mundane object in his drawing: a hat. The narrator then realized that the adults could not image a world with possibilities. Instead, the adults lived in a boring world filled with mundane things, such as “bridges, and golf, and politics and neckties. And the grownup would be greatly pleased to have met such a sensible man” (de Saint-Exupery 2). The narrator realizes that he cannot talk to the adults about magical occurrences that are filled with adventure. He feels sorry for the adults due to the world they are forced to inhabit.

The narrator’s plane crashes into the desert, where he meets a little prince who still possesses the wonder and the imagination of a child. He is alone and worried that he will die from thirst. Therefore, he is rather surprised to discover the little prince. Also, the little prince is not worried about mundane things; he asks the narrator to draw a sheep for him. The narrator discovers that he cannot. This is because “the adults discouraged me in my painter’s career when I was six years old, and I never learned to draw anything, except boa from the outside and boas from the inside” (de Saint-Exupery 3). In this manner, the narrator realizes that the adult world deprived him of all creativity and imagination. He had possessed these traits as a child; however, the adults told him to put aside these abilities. Rather, he had been encouraged to focus on practical considerations.

The little prince, however, still possesses the wonder and imagination of a child. The narrator draws him his traditional picture of an elephant inside a boa. The narrator is rather surprised when the little prince can properly interpret the drawing. When the narrator draws him a box, he says that the sheep is inside the box. The little prince indicates “that is exactly the way I wanted it!” (de Saint-Exupery 4). It is obvious that the adults would have told the narrator that he was wasting his time. It is also obvious that the adults would not have grasped that the sheep was inside the box.

The little prince tells the narrator about the asteroids he visited in his journeys. Adults run the asteroids in a ridiculous manner. For instance, one asteroid is run by a king who has no subjects. The king repeatedly gives orders to the prince. He orders him to not yawn and then he orders him to yawn. When the little prince indicates that he cannot do this, the king modifies his orders. The king tells the little prince to yawn sometimes and to not yawn sometimes. Of course, this order makes no sense. However, “what the king fundamentally insisted upon was that authority should be respected. He tolerated no disobedience” (de Saint-Exupery 14). The king recognized the difficulty of this plan though. He did make his orders reasonable simply because he did not want to be disobeyed. The king represents the adults who often give orders regardless of their feasibility. Rather, the adults in the world merely want to exercise authority. They do not care if their authority makes sense.

Another important scene involves the little prince taking a train ride. The little prince notices that the adults rush from place to place. They never enjoy the place where they are at the present time. The children who ride the train do. The switchman tells the little prince “Only the children are flattening their noses against the windowpanes” (de Saint-Exupery 30). The children appreciate life as it happens. The adults only look towards the future. In this manner, the adults actually fail to enjoy life. The children, however, enjoy the present time. This is the only time that actually exists.

In the story The Little Prince by de Saint-Exupery, the author utilizes a series of events to explain the difference between the children and the adults. While the children still enjoy wonder and amazement, the adults have lost their imagination. Rather, the adults rush from place to place. They give orders and follow orders, regardless of whether or not the orders make sense. They are obsessed with authority. The adults rush from place to place, never enjoying where they are at the present. The children, however, live fully in the present moment and enjoy their lives.

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