The Little Prince 2

The Little Prince (in French, Le Petit Prince)

Author: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Type of work: Children’s story, novella

Genre: Fable, allegory

Language: French

Time and place written: The summer and fall of 1942, while Saint-Exupéry was living in Long Island, New York

Date of first publication: First published in English translation in 1943. The first French edition did not appear until 1946.

Narrator · A pilot who crashes in the Sahara desert, where he meets the little prince. The narrator tells his story of the encounter six years after it happened.

Point of view: The narrator gives a first-person account, although he spends large portions of the story recounting the little prince’s own story of his travels.

Tone: When describing his surreal, poignant encounter with the little prince, the narrator’s tone is bittersweet. When describing the adult world, the narrator’s tone is matter-of-fact and often regretful.

Tense: Past

Settings (time): “Six years ago,” although the current date is never specified

Settings (place): The Sahara Desert and outer space

Protagonists: The little prince, the pilot

Major conflict: The childlike perspectives of the prince and, to some extent, those of the narrator are in conflict with the stifling beliefs of the adult world.

Rising action: After he believes he has been spurned by his rose, the prince travels to neighboring planets and eventually lands on Earth. He wanders through the desert in search of humans, and he is eventually found by the fox.

Climax: The fox teaches the little prince his secret, and the little prince realizes the value of his rose.

Falling action: The prince meets the narrator, to whom he passes along the fox’s instructions. He is then sent back to the heavens by the snake’s bite.

Themes: The dangers of narrow-mindedness, enlightenment through exploration, relationships teach responsibility

Motifs: Secrecy, the narrator’s drawings, taming, serious matters

Symbols: The stars, the desert, the trains, water

Foreshadowing: When the snake greets the prince, he alludes to his ability to send the prince back to the heavens, which he does at the end of the novel

Although it is impossible to know what was in the author’s mind as he wrote The Little Prince, several aspects of the novel can be read as commentary on the painful World War II period. Most notably, the baobab trees can be read as a warning of what happens when a close eye is not kept on things that are dangerous. The story in Chapter IV of a Turkish astronomer whose work is initially dismissed because of his ethnic costumes addresses the problems of racial prejudice and discrimination.

Nonetheless, the story’s vagueness opens it up to a number of readings, and not everything relates to war. Many of the ideas that Saint-Exupéry discusses in the work—modern civilization’s misplaced priorities and its lack of spirituality, for example—are common literary themes, although it is rare to find them discussed with such frankness. Saint-Exupéry’s complaints about the general degeneracy of the human condition apply to any era and can be understood without any knowledge of the historical context of The Little Prince

Throughout The Little Prince, Saint-Exupéry portrays children as innocent and truthful and adults as corrupt and dull. As the little prince journeys from one planet to another, he finds grown-ups such as the businessman and the geographer to lack creativity and imagination. They can only quantify the world in the dullest of terms. The little prince, on the other hand, acknowledges that the most important qualities in life are invisible and mysterious. He constantly asks questions instead of giving answers, and the search for spiritual truth seems to be his sole priority. Above all, he understands that relationships are the most important thing in life and that no one needs an entire well or rose garden when a single drop of water or a single flower will do.

Unlike most adults, the little prince knows what he is looking for and exactly how much of it he needs. The narrator also recognizes the validity of the childhood perspective, even though he occasionally lapses into a grown-up mind-set. By the end of the story, however, the narrator has regained some of his childhood passion, demonstrating that the clear viewpoint of children is not limited by age.

One of the story’s themes is that true understanding cannot be achieved without real-world experience. The events that happen to the narrator in the desert exemplify this theme. Even though the narrator learns much from listening to the prince’s story, it’s evident that learning the prince’s lessons through firsthand experience gives them a clarity that would not be attained otherwise. The narrator finds the well on his own—his guide, the prince, falls asleep and needs to be carried all night. In the end, the prince’s story provides only a blueprint to the narrator about how much he has been missing. To obtain the fulfillment he seeks, he must act on his own. By extension, Saint-Exupéry teaches us that we must ourselves act to learn the lessons in his story, although this moral is never made explicitly clear

The Little Prince 1

The Auther:
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was Born in Lyons, France, in 1900, he considered himself a pilot above all else. He flew for twenty years, everything from cartography missions to commercial airlines, and flying this paces might of gaven him a significant place in his philosophical essays and fantasy writings. The aviation was often the main theme of Saint-Exupéry’s launching point for more abstract discussions on issues like the search for wisdom and the meaning of life.


Saint-Exupéry began writing The Little Prince during World War II, after Germany’s invasion of France had forced him to give up aviation and flee to New York. In addition to his torturous thoughts of the war in Europe, having to leave his homeland and no longer being able to fly planes affected Saint-Exupéry deeply. The novel’s nostalgia for childhood indicates both Saint-Exupéry’s homesick desire to return to France and his hope of returning to a time of peace. This wartime stress undoubtedly contributed to the sense of urgency in Saint-Exupéry’s message of love and compassion.

The narrator is present throughout the book to tell the story of his friendship with the Little Prince and comment on what he has learned from him. He is very attracted to the Prince, largely because he is childlike, innocent, and pure. The narrator admits that he prefers the openness, honesty, and naiveté of children to the pretensions and blindness of adults, who cannot see beyond the surface of life. The narrator feels very close to the Little Prince because he is able to see the truth and importance of things. Even after six years, he remembers everything about this little man from another planet; as a result, he writes the book in memory of him.

The Little Prince was Published in 1943, it is about a fantasy of a pilot, stranded in the Sahara, who meets a small boy from another planet, and it was not E.T. The boy, who refers to himself as a prince, is on a quest for knowledge. The little prince asks questions of the pilot and tells the pilot of life on his own very small planet. This story is told in a simple fashion, as children's stories typically are, but it is not really a children's story. It is a story of a grown-up who has almost forgotten what is important. It is the story of the pilot's reconnection to his own sense of imagination and wonder. It is the story of the re-opening of the pilot's heart.

The story is told on the narrator's point of view. Becuase he is the one who is telling the story.

In The Little Prince, Saint-Exupéry explains the importance of seeing the whole truth in order to find beauty. He believes that visible things are only shells that hint at the real worth hidden inside. He points out that man has not learned to look beneath the surface, or perhaps, has forgotten how to do so. Because adults never look inside, they will never know themselves or others.
All his life, Saint-Exupéry thought that grown-ups cared mostly about inconsequential matters, such as golf and neckties. When they talked about important matters, they always became dull and boring. They seemed afraid to open up their hearts to the real issues of life; instead, they chose to function on a surface level.

The narrator, an airplane pilot, crashes in the Sahara desert. The crash badly damages his airplane and leaves the narrator with very little food or water. As he is worrying over his predicament, he is approached by the little prince, a very serious little blond boy who asks the narrator to draw him a sheep. The narrator obliges, and the two become friends. The pilot learns that the little prince comes from a small planet that the little prince calls Asteroid 325 but that people on Earth call Asteroid B-612. The little prince took great care of this planet, preventing any bad seeds from growing and making sure it was never over run by baobab trees. One day, a mysterious rose sprouted on the planet and the little prince fell in love with it. But when he caught the rose in a lie one day, he decided that he could not trust her anymore. He grew lonely and decided to leave. Despite a last-minute reconciliation with the rose, the prince set out to explore other planets and cure his loneliness.

The narrator, an airplane pilot, crashes in the Sahara desert. The crash badly damages his airplane and leaves the narrator with very little food or water. As he is worrying over his predicament, he is approached by the little prince, a very serious little blond boy who asks the narrator to draw him a sheep. The narrator obliges, and the two become friends. The pilot learns that the little prince comes from a small planet that the little prince calls Asteroid 325 but that people on Earth call Asteroid B-612. The little prince took great care of this planet, preventing any bad seeds from growing and making sure it was never overrun by baobab trees. One day, a mysterious rose sprouted on the planet and the little prince fell in love with it. But when he caught the rose in a lie one day, he decided that he could not trust her anymore. He grew lonely and decided to leave. Despite a last-minute reconciliation with the rose, the prince set out to explore other planets and cure his loneliness.

While journeying, the narrator tells us, the little prince passes by neighboring asteroids and encounters for the first time the strange, narrow-minded world of grown-ups. On the first six planets the little prince visits, he meets a king, a vain man, a drunkard, a businessman, a lamplighter, and a geographer, all of whom live alone and are overly consumed by their chosen occupations. Such strange behavior both amuses and perturbs the little prince. He does not understand their need to order people around, to be admired, and to own everything. With the exception of the lamplighter, whose dogged faithfulness he admires, the little prince does not think much of the adults he visits, and he does not learn anything useful. However, he learns from the geographer that flowers do not last forever, and he begins to miss the rose he has left behind.

At the geographer’s suggestion, the little prince visits Earth, but he lands in the middle of the desert and cannot find any humans. Instead, he meets a snake who speaks in riddles and hints darkly that its lethal poison can send the little prince back to the heavens if he so wishes. The little prince ignores the offer and continues his explorations, stopping to talk to a three-petaled flower and to climb the tallest mountain he can find, where he confuses the echo of his voice for conversation. Eventually, the little prince finds a rose garden, which surprises and depresses him—his rose had told him that she was the only one of her kind.

The prince befriends a fox, who teaches him that the important things in life are visible only to the heart, that his time away from the rose makes the rose more special to him, and that love makes a person responsible for the beings that one loves. The little prince realizes that, even though there are many roses, his love for his rose makes her unique and that he is therefore responsible for her. Despite this revelation, he still feels very lonely because he is so far away from his rose. The prince ends his story by describing his encounters with two men, a railway switchman and a salesclerk.

It is now the narrator’s eighth day in the desert, and at the prince’s suggestion, they set off to find a well. The water feeds their hearts as much as their bodies, and the two share a moment of bliss as they agree that too many people do not see what is truly important in life. The little prince’s mind, however, is fixed on returning to his rose, and he begins making plans with the snake to head back to his planet. The narrator is able to fix his plane on the day before the one-year anniversary of the prince’s arrival on Earth, and he walks sadly with his friend out to the place the prince landed. The snake bites the prince, who falls noiselessly to the sand.

The narrator takes comfort when he cannot find the prince’s body the next day and is confident that the prince has returned to his asteroid. The narrator is also comforted by the stars, in which he now hears the tinkling of his friend’s laughter. Often, however, he grows sad and wonders if the sheep he drew has eaten the prince’s rose. The narrator concludes by showing his readers a drawing of the desert landscape and by asking us to stop for a while under the stars if we are ever in the area and to let the narrator know immediately if the little prince has returned.