Despite its popularity, “The Little Prince” is a bit of a puzzle. Ostensibly a children’s book, it reads like a combination of children’s fable, surrealist fiction, poetry, memoir, dream narrative, and Platonic dialogue–an unlikely mixture that manages to be deeply moving and enchanting. Its meaning is obscure, its ending open to multiple interpretations. It reads like a fable or parable, yet defies any neat explanation of what it’s a fable about.
The work is an internationally beloved modern classic because the simple story cuts to the heart of important truths about childhood and adulthood, love and relationship, wonder, fidelity, longing, and loss.
About the Author
Much of this mysterious story reflects the life of its author, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a tragic figure who died during a combat flight in World War II. The French poet and aviator was born in 1900 in Lyon, France, and lost a 15-year-old, golden-haired younger brother to rheumatic fever.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was obsessed with flying and spent many years aloft, despite experiencing multiple crashes. One crash took place in the Libyan desert—just like the Aviator in “The Little Prince.”
The novel deals with themes and questions present in everyone’s life. It tells of a pilot who crashes in the desert, where he meets a child referred to simply as “the little prince.” The boy asks the pilot to draw him a sheep to take back with him to his home planet, an asteroid the size of a small house. Bit by bit, the pilot learns that the prince had on his planet an anthropomorphic rose whose emotional neediness drove the prince to leave his planet, in spite of his love for the rose. The little prince then journeyed to several planets where he met adults who each represent a type: a king who rules over nothing, a conceited man who thinks everyone admires him, a drunk who drinks because he’s ashamed of drinking, a businessman who thinks he owns all the stars, and a lamplighter who mechanically completes his task once every minute.
A Multitude of Lessons
The simplicity of the narrative, which lacks backstory, complex characterization, or realistic setting, allows it to penetrate more quickly and directly to its central issues through a poetic, quasi-mythological lens. What are those central issues? For so short a work, “The Little Prince” offers a long list of answers. But I will focus here on only three: childhood, loneliness, and how looking at the world with eyes of love transforms everything.
The narrator pilot begins the story with an anecdote from his childhood, where several adults failed to understand one of his drawings. The inability of “grown-ups” to understand what really matters in life (unlike children) becomes a recurrent theme. Here, we have to understand Saint-Exupéry’s term “grown-up” doesn’t simply apply to all adults, but instead to those who have shed their childlike sense of wonder.
These adults have become engrossed in the “grown-up” business of weighing figures, leaping into the latest fashions, accumulating profit, and grappling for power. As the narrator puts it, those people have no interest in “boa constrictors, or primeval forests, or stars.”
The theme of a childlike outlook on the world receives further emphasis in an early exchange between the pilot and the prince. The pilot is busy trying to fix his airplane. He becomes annoyed by the prince’s constant questions, the latest of which is about whether the prince’s sheep will eat the flower on his planet.
The exasperated pilot cries, “Don’t you see—I am very busy with matters of consequence!”
To which the prince replies, “You talk just like the grown-ups! ... You mix everything up. ... You confuse everything. ... The flowers have been growing thorns for millions of years. For millions of years the sheep have been eating them just the same. And is it not a matter of consequence to try to understand why the flowers go to so much trouble to grow thorns which are never of any use to them? Is the warfare between the sheep and the flowers not important? ... And if I know—I, myself—one flower which is unique in the world, which grows nowhere but on my planet, but which one little sheep can destroy in a single bite some morning, without even noticing what he is doing—Oh! You think that is not important!”
Saint-Exupéry makes several points here: First, what appears unimportant to adults can be of the greatest importance in a child’s world, and it shouldn’t necessarily be dismissed by the adults. Second, the occupations that sometimes engross adults—such as adding up endless sums, like the businessman on his lonely planet—can be less meaningful than some of the questions children wonder about. The child is concerned with particulars: things he knows, sees, and experiences. He asks “impractical” questions. For this reason, the child sometimes has a better chance of understanding the rarity and loveliness of every good thing, even the smallest, least “useful,” most hidden thing.
The Little Prince explains how the love of a particular thing can transform our view of the entire universe: “If someone loves a flower, of which just one single blossom grows in all the millions and millions of stars, it is enough to make him happy just to look at the stars. He can say to himself: ‘Somewhere, my flower is there.’”
The Little Prince’s devotion to his long-lost flower highlights the story’s theme of loneliness. Loneliness is everywhere: The pilot crash-lands in the middle of nowhere, isolated from civilization. The Little Prince lives alone on a tiny planet until the coming of the rose, whom he eventually leaves by herself because, in his words, “I was too young to know how to love her.” When the Little Prince comes to earth, he lands in an empty, lonely desert. His first acquaintance, a snake, tells him, “It is also lonely among men.” The next creature the Little Prince encounters is a fox who is so lonely that he pleads with the Little Prince to tame him. But the Little Prince must eventually leave the fox as well.
This permeating sense of isolation only heightens the preciousness of love and relationships when they do appear in the book, which brings us back to the way that love transforms one’s vision of life. It is the fox who speaks most eloquently on the subject and whose words seem to disclose the heart of the book. He says to the Little Prince:
“If you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in the world. To you, I shall be unique in the world ... It will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. That is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the colour of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat.”
The relationship between the boy and the fox changes everything, even the significance of a field of wheat. The most-quoted line from the novel also comes from the fox: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
When we love something, and commit to it, it becomes precious and unique. The Little Prince comes to see the value of his rose precisely because it’s his. He’s tended, cared for, and put up with her, not some other flower. And it sets the whole world ablaze with a new radiance. Everything becomes precious in the light of this central love. Everything begins to reflect it, so that we see the world, so to speak, with clearer eyes.
The Little Prince teaches this to the Aviator. “The stars are beautiful because of a flower that cannot be seen. ... What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well. ” The child or adult with a certain kind of childlike gaze sees past just the surface of things, sees that at the heart of the world, and in all the particulars of the world, lies something lovable, if we will only see it and commit to it.
