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