The Little Prince

I have heard the Little Prince by Antoine Saint-Exupery described as “a child's story for adults, or an adult's story for children". If the number of times we read a book is any measure of our appreciation for that book, the Little Prince may be my favorite book. It is a book to be read to us as small children and a book we can read to ourselves for the rest of our lives.

The story begins with the narrator saying that when he was a child; he read a book about jungles from which he learned about boa constrictors. The book inspired him to draw his first picture, which showed a boa constrictor that had swallowed an elephant. However, all the adults that he showed it to thought it was a picture of a hat. The narrator drew a second picture showing a cross-section of a boa constrictor with an elephant inside it. All the adults that he showed it to told him to give up drawing. He did, grew up and, like Antoine de Saint-Exupery himself, grew up to be a pilot.

Many years later the narrator's plane crashes in the Sahara Desert. One day a child, the little prince, who says to him, "Please, draw me a sheep approaches him." The narrator says that he can only draw one thing and draws the picture that all adults had mistaken for a hat. The little prince immediately recognizes it as an elephant swallowed by a boa constrictor, and insists on getting a picture of a sheep. The narrator draws several sheep that the little prince is not happy with. Eventually he draws a box with air-holes and says, "The sheep you want is inside". The little prince is delighted with the picture.

The two become friends. The pilot learns that the little prince comes from a minor 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 evil seeds from growing and preventing the baobab trees from overrunning the planet. The prince tells of his love for a vain and silly rose that began growing on the asteroid's surface some time ago. Given to pretension, the rose exaggerates ailments to gain attention and have the prince care for her. The prince says he nourished the rose and attended her, making a screen or glass globe to protect her from the icy wind, watering her, and keeping off the caterpillars. Although the prince fell in love with the rose, he also felt that she was taking advantage of him and he resolved to leave the planet to explore the rest of the universe. Upon their goodbyes, the rose is serious and apologizes that she failed to show she loved him and that they had both been silly. She wishes him well and turns down his desire to leave her in the glass globe, saying she will protect herself. The prince laments he did not understand how to love his rose while he was with her and should have listened to her kind actions, rather than her vain words.

While journeying to cure his loneliness, 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, who says that he reigns over all the stars, although he cannot command them to do anything. He has no human subjects, the only other inhabitant of his planet being an old rat. A conceited man, who wishes for admirers and will not listen to anything, which is not a compliment. A drunkard, who drinks to forget because he wants to forget that he is ashamed, and is ashamed because he drinks. A business executive, who claims that he owns all the stars, saying that kings own nothing, they only reign. A lamplighter, whose planet revolves quickly, meaning that it quickly changes from night to day and back again. The lamplighter is constantly lighting and extinguishing the lamp. And, a geographer whose planet is larger than those of the other five. The little prince asks him if the planet has rivers or mountains. The Geographer says that he does not know because he is not an explorer. He refuses to leave his desk and explore but says that he would distrust what any explorer told him. The little prince says that his planet has three volcanoes and a flower. He is told that geographers do not consider flowers to be a feature of a planet because they do not last forever. It shocked the little prince to learn that flowers do not last forever, and he misses the rose he has left behind.

At the geographer’s suggestion, the little prince visits Earth, but the visit to Earth begins with a deeply pessimistic appraisal of humanity. The six absurd people the prince encountered earlier comprise, according to the narrator, just about the entire adult world.

The prince 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 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 who told him how passengers constantly rushed from one place to another aboard trains, never satisfied with where they were and not knowing where they were going; only the children among them ever bothered to look out the windows to enjoy the journey. And, a merchant who talked to the prince about his product, a pill that eliminated the need to drink for a week, saving people 53 minutes. The Prince thought that instead of saving the 53 minutes and not knowing what to do with them, it would be better to walk to get a drink.

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 fixes his mind on returning to his rose, and he makes plans with the snake to return to his planet. The narrator fixes 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 finds comfort the next day when he cannot find the prince’s and is confident that the prince has returned to his asteroid. The stars also comforted the narrator, 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 princes 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.

It has taken many years—and many readings—for me to begin to understand that the Little Prince is a love story. Not an allegory of the meaning of love, but a fable of love. I say fable rather than parable, or allegory, because I think of fables, more than parables, or allegories, as teaching spiritual message more distanced from normal life. I think of parables and allegories as being more connected to normal life. While the conflict of the plot can be conflict with others, conflict with the environment, and conflict with the supernatural, the key conflict of the story is conflict with the self, the internal battle the lead character has within. It is the story of the emotions of conflict—isolation, fear, and uncertainty—emotions alleviated only by love. These are conflicts we must deal with at all times in our life-from childhood thru old age.

The triumph of the “Petit Prince” is in the way Saint-Exupery could articulate the concrete in the abstract-to make a fable of abstract ideas clarified with specific loves. In a book of less than 100 pages he told a fable in harmony with the spiritual message of the outstanding teachers of history. The fable of the Little Prince is a victory in the battle, described by Albert Camus as the conflict, "between each man's happiness and the illness of abstraction".