Read this as a kid and a teenager and never grasped the sub-text.
So spill… what’s it all about?
Book link - “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
My senior year of high school we spent 2 quarters reading Le Petit Prince in French III/IV. We even had to see a play (they performed a scene in French, rewound, the did it in English). From what I remember a pilot crashs his plane on the Prince’s planet and then then travel to other planets (each with a single strange inhabintent) before going to the stangest planet of all, Earth.
People are going to die, eventually. In a fair world, these people would not have died. Life, however, isn’t fair.
“What is essential is invisible to the eye”.
IMHO it’s about the importance above all else of taking loving care of your own little part of the world and the people closest to you. They need it, and depend on you.
You’ll often hear people (like me) tell you it means more as you get older.
Uh… yeah. My interpretation was the same as ElvisL1ves’s. The Little Prince is still pretty popular in France and they sell “The Rose of the Little Prince” perfume for ridiculous prices. It seems strangely at odds with the spirit of the book.
When I was little, someone gave me “Little Prince” boardgame for Christmas. Never could figure out how to play the thing!
I have no idea what happened to it and boardgamegeek has no knowledge of such a game.
Matters of consequence.
It’s clearly an anti-environmental parable. If you let the ecology of a planet have free reign, the populace is swallowed up by nature. Little did the author know then that being a proponent of introduced species to control growth was something with its own perils. Just ask the Australians.
What?
It’s way more than you probably wanted, but here are some of my observations on the book from when I read it a few years ago for a Fantasy Lit class:
This is a story in which a visitor from another world comes to visit our own (as in, for example, the TV series "Mork and Mindy"). This allows the author to shed light on our world by letting us see it through the eyes of a stranger. In the real world, there really are those who have only arrived here fairly recently: they're called children. Children can have their own unique way of looking at things, and adults who are around children sometimes report seeing familiar things afresh by watching a child's reactions. Perhaps this is one reason why Saint-Exupery made the "little prince" little: he is a child, with a child's point of view, and so he can challenge the "grown-up" perception of the world.
In fact, the book often contrasts a child's way of thinking with a grown-up's, usually with disdain for the grown-up. "The grown-ups discouraged me in my painter's career," the narrator tells us. "Grown-ups love figures" and are only interested in things that can be quantified; they don't understand what's really important; whereas, "for us who understand life, figures are a matter of indifference." At one point the little prince gets exasperated with the pilot and accuses, "You talk just like the grown-ups!"
Hey, isn't Saint-Exupery being a little unfair to "grown-ups and their ways"? Isn't he indulging in stereotyping? Are all grown-ups really as awful as that? I'm sure I could find one or two grown-ups who don't love figures. Children, in real life, are not necessarily more perceptive or appreciative than adults. Perhaps it would be fairer to call what Saint-Exupery is doing "hyperbole" rather than "stereotyping." To some extent, he is inverting or challenging the values of the everyday adult world so that the reader will see things in new ways. The little prince reminds me a little of someone like Thoreau or Walt Whitman (as in his poem "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer"), going around saying "So what?" to the things the world deems important. ("'I admire you,' said the little prince [to the conceited man], shrugging his shoulders slightly, 'but what is there in that to interest you so much?'") The reader is thus challenged to think about what "matters of consequence" really are and to engage in the great task of discovering what is truly important in life.
When I wrote down some of the things I thought Saint-Exupery was trying to say in this book, or some of the conclusions I was drawing, I found myself partly agreeing but thinking, "True to some extent, but an oversimplification." And then I asked, is the oversimplification present in the book itself, perhaps because Saint-Exupery is indulging in hyperbole to get his points across (in what he says about grown-ups, for example)? Or do I introduce it when I try to distill, interpret, or infer the book's "messages"? Is it even possible to come straight out and say Great Truths plainly (as opposed to embedding them in a story) without oversimplifying?
Hmmm. Couldn't fantasy be a sneaky way of saying things about our world without committing oneself entirely to what one is saying? Such and such is true in the world of the story, and that world somewhat resembles our own real world, and so it's up to the reader to decide just how much of the story's wisdom carries over. Of course, it's always up to the reader to decide how much of a story's message to accept, but with a fantasy, the author has a way out: "I just meant it was true for that world. Whether it also applies to this one, who knows?"
One of the questions this book asks us is how we see other people. To the king, all men are subjects. To the conceited man, all other men are admirers. For such people (as for a salesmen who sees all other people as potential customers, or a politician who sees all people as voters, or a man who sees all women as sex objects, or an egotist who doesn't really see other people at all), the world is simplified: this is one advantage of such a point of view.
The little prince likes the lamplighter better than the other asteroidians he meets, because he finds his work in some way meaningful, beautiful, and therefore useful. It is never a complete waste of time to do or create something that adds to the beauty in the world. But this leads to the question: What is beautiful? Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? Why couldn't figures be beautiful?
"Taming" someone, establishing ties, developing a relationship, is one of the main themes of the book. We see it happening between the little prince and the fox, between the prince and his flower, between the pilot and the little prince. It involves seeing someone else as unique, of special importance to oneself.
Does it matter to me when someone else suffers or dies? ("No man is an island," said Donne, or an asteroid?) There are a whole lot of people in the world, and I cannot know, tame, or grieve for all of them. It is only when I have "established ties" of some sort (and there are different ways of doing this, and in different degrees!) that I care about what happens to them. This is why one rose can matter more than a whole gardenful, or one person matter more to me than a whole countryful. What matters is not how much we have (or how many people we know), but much we appreciate, know, understand, and "tame" what we have.
And yet, there can be great beauty in a profusion of roses. Otherwise, why bother watching forty-four sunsets in a row?
What is the "danger of the baobabs" that the narrator wants to warn us about? I've never even seen a baobab; why should I worry? Gee, they must be metaphors for something! Obviously they're something that must be destroyed as soon as possible before they get out of hand, but what? Bad habits? (That doesn't seem to be a bad guess.) Bad people? (That's a horrific thought: What if someone took this as a mandate to kill all the bad people as young as possible, soon as they could be recognized as bad?) Or is this a more general warning that some things you can safely put off but some things have to be dealt with right away, and it's important to know what is and what is not urgent and not to get lazy?I can’t find a thing about a boardgame, either. However, I searched for Little Prince +game, and found some tile games, including ], “The Little Prince protects his planet”, “The Little Prince tames the fox”, and others. Any of them look familiar?
Remember that Saint-Exupery wrote it during WW2, while his beloved France was being overrun and transformed by the Nazis. In “Terre des Hommes”, he goes on at length upon his view that civilization itself was being destroyed, and his inconsolability over the thought.
I’ve always interpreted the baobabs as representing a wanton, or even simply uninformed, willingness to damage or destroy what others cherish. The baobab seeds are everywhere on the asteroid, cannot be removed entirely, and can sprout whenever allowed to by the neglect of the “lovers”.
Great points.
Not at all. I did find a 2003 game called Der Kleine Prinz and the board is similar with all the linked dots but it’s in German and apparenlty has elements that are similar to Cranium.
The game I had was likely a tie-in to the 1974 movie.
The Little Prince has always been a favorite book of mine. As I grew older I found even more meaning in it.
(NOTE: Spoilers follow, though if you’re reading this thread, you probably have already read the book)
The Little Prince is looking for what is important in life, what purpose there can be. He has his daily routine, taking care of his little planet and so on, and develops a relationship with a beautiful rose whose seed has taken root. But he feels there must be more. And so he goes.
He meets many self-absorbed people, all adults, who have fixed and very material concepts of what is important to them in life: adulation, power, “keeping score” (the astronomer), work (the lamplighter who has no time for anything but work any more but can’t stop doing it), even one who is lost to alcohol. They have lost the child’s capacity for imagination and emotional growth.
He lands on Earth and soon finds a garden filled with roses just like the one he had known. He is greatly saddened, as he had thought of his rose as unique and special, and runs off.
Then (in what to me is the key scene in the book) he meets a fox. This fox is wild and will not approach the boy, but mysteriously asks to be “tamed”, though this will make him sad when the LP leaves to continue on his journey. The LP does not understand this, but does as he asks, and makes fast friends with the fox.
When at last the LP must go, the fox says he will cry, and the LP points out that the fox has known this all along – so why did he ask to be tamed?
Because the love he now bears for the LP colors so many things in his life. The color of wheat when the sunlight strikes it is just the color of the boy’s hair, and now when he looks on the wheat in the sun, it will bring him joy to remember the LP. And now the LP realizes that even though there are gardens full of roses by the dozens and hundreds, they mean nothing to him when compared to his one rose that he took such care of, for it is the love we develop that is truly important in life.
On ne voit qu’avec le coeur, fit le renard. L’essentiel est invisible aux yeux. One only sees with the heart: what is essential is invisible to the eye.
Now all this is told to us in flashbacks, as we only meet the LP through the protagonist, the author whose point of view we share. And this man has lost his childhood imagination, and is concerned only with the present and the material, like most adults become. After meeting the Little Prince, he is rekindled with the realization of what is important in life.
And now the sound of a creaking pulley will always remind him of the sweetness of cold water in the desert, and looking up at the stars will make him think of the Little Prince somewhere on his asteroid far away…
This sentiment is probably why I also liked Moulin Rouge! so much: the greatest thing you’ll ever learn: is just to love, and be loved in return.
Well, damn. It’s already been covered. Anyway…
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Excellent post, robardin.
There remains one question: did the sheep eat the rose? I don’t think so, but you never can tell.