The Little Prince

The little prince is a mysterious young boy whom the pilot meets after crashing in the Sahara. Over the course of the next several days, the pilot learns more about who he is and where he comes from: he lives on a tiny planet (Asteroid B-612) that he carefully tends to, pulling up baobab trees and raking out volcanoes. Until recently, the prince was all alone on his asteroid. One day a flower blossomed, and the prince struck up a kind of friendship with her. Over time, however, he grew tired of the flower's demands and artifices, so he decided to leave home, eventually arriving on Earth. Nevertheless, he continues to feel anxiety over the flower's well-being and guilt over leaving her to fend for herself. These feelings intensify as a result of the friendships the prince forms with the pilot and a fox, and he slowly comes to believe that he made a commitment to care for the flower. As a result, he decides to return to his home planet at the end of the book, even though doing so means allowing a venomous snake to bite (and apparently kill) him.

The prince is curious by nature and—having lived alone for so long—unfamiliar with many of the rules and conventions of human society. Like the pilot, he also tends to find these conventions absurd. In particular, his interactions with the people he meets on different planets highlight the strangeness and irrationality of much of what we see as normal adult life. When he meets the businessman, for instance, the prince finds it odd that he wants to make money in order to buy things that will let him make even more money. Tellingly, the one person (other than the pilot) who impresses the prince is the lamplighter because he shows such dedication in following orders. Ultimately, what the prince values are the ties between people. 

The fox is the first real friend the prince makes during his travels. The prince encounters him shortly after first seeing the rosebush and, feeling lonely, invites the fox to play with him. The fox explains that the prince will need to tame him in order to be his friend, so the prince does so, only to find that the close relationship they have forged makes saying goodbye to one another all the more difficult. The fox reassures the prince that it was worth it because being friends with the prince has entirely changed the way he experiences the world. In this way, the fox gives voice to one of the book's central ideas: establishing a relationship—though sometimes painful—causes permanent and worthwhile changes in both participants. Since the fox also draws attention to several other important ideas—for instance, the notion that only emotion and imagination can reveal what is "essential" (63) in life—he plays a central role in the character arcs of both the prince and the pilot, putting words to much of what they both instinctively value.

The rose growing on the prince's home planet is the first flower of its kind the prince has ever seen, and her beauty impresses him. This pleases the rose, who is very conscious of her looks and eager for admiration. Besides being vain, the rose can also be manipulative and self-dramatizing, playing on the prince’s appreciation of her and asking him to set up screens and glass to shelter her from the wind. Nevertheless, she is deeply attached to the prince and therefore saddened when he leaves, even though she tries to cover up her feelings with bluster. Belatedly, the prince comes to understand the rose's love for him and to value her actions (i.e. perfuming the planet) over her words.

When the prince first arrives on Earth, he encounters a snake who explains where he is. Although the snake is venomous, he feels sorry for the prince on account of his innocence and coils around him rather than attacking him. He does, however, offer to help the prince return to his home planet by biting him—an offer the prince ultimately accepts. The fact that the snake is deadly but apparently kind makes him a kind of mirror image of the snake in Judeo-Christian tradition, whose treachery results in Adam and Eve's exile from Eden. In Saint-Exupéry's story, death is sad but not a punishment because it also helps give life its meaning.

The king is the first person the prince encounters on his travels. He is obsessed with his own authority and insists that he commands everything in the universe. However, he is also a "kindly man," so he "orders" (29) the prince to do anything he was planning on doing anyway and explains that he himself would be at fault if he gave an order someone couldn't follow. Still, the king’s preoccupation with being obeyed confuses the prince, who refuses to act as his minister or ambassador. From an allegorical perspective, the episode involving the king is a commentary on the frequent ineffectuality of governments—particularly governments throughout much of Europe in the lead up to World War II.

The vain man the prince encounters on the second planet is, as his name suggests, completely preoccupied with being admired. This is particularly nonsensical given that he lives alone on his planet: there is no one to admire him, and no one for him to surpass in looks, wealth, intelligence, etc. His vanity also prevents him from properly hearing or engaging with the prince. The encounter highlights how pointless and isolating narcissism is.

The drunkard lives alone on the third planet the prince visits and drinks continuously. His reason for drinking, as he says himself, is to forget that he is ashamed of drinking. The episode highlights the bizarre "logic" at work in many self-destructive human behaviors.

The businessman the prince meets on the fourth planet is endlessly "busy" (36)counting all the stars he owns. This is illogical on multiple levels, as his conversation with the prince slowly makes clear. It’s unclear what it means to "own" (38) something that can't be touched, used, or given away, and it seems pointless to make money off of an item (in this case, the stars) simply to be able to buy more of that item, etc. The businessman's constant insistence that he is "serious" (38) further highlights the inherent absurdity of his actions, which—above all—reflect an inability to appreciate the real "value" (36)of the stars: their beauty and everything they evoke to the human imagination. In many ways, this is symptomatic of society at large, which Saint-Exupéry suggests increasingly cares only about money and what it can buy.

On the fifth planet he travels to, the prince finds a lamplighter constantly lighting and extinguishing his streetlamp. When the lamplighter initially received his orders to light the lamp at night and put it out during the day, the planet was spinning at a slower pace. Now, however, a "day" lasts only a minute, so the lamplighter never has a chance to rest. Although the lamplighter's predicament is in many ways a commentary on the absurdity of spending one's life endlessly working a job, the lamplighter himself is more sympathetic than most of the other characters the prince encounters. In fact, the prince himself feels that there is something admirable about the lamplighter since he is devoted to something other than himself.

The geographer is the last person the prince encounters before coming to Earth. Although the prince is initially excited by the implied adventurousness of the geographer's job, it quickly becomes clear that the geographer is as misguided as the other adults the prince has met. He knows nothing about his own planet, for instance, because he claims it is not his responsibility but an explorer's to actually venture out into the world. Furthermore, he is apparently interested only in noting the locations of mountains, rivers, oceans, etc. He has no sense of these landmarks as beautiful or awe-inspiring in their own right, as evidenced by the fact that he dismisses the prince's flower as unimportant. In this way, the figure of the geographer illustrates the absurdity of caring about dry knowledge and facts for their own sake while ignoring "ephemeral" (46) things simply because they will one day disappear.

While wandering on Earth, the prince meets a switchman whose job it is to operate the switch allowing a train to change tracks. He explains to the prince that although the passengers on board the trains are constantly on the move, they are not looking for anything in particular. The implication is that much of the busyness and hurry of society is similarly hollow. Unlike most of the adults in the novel, the switchman himself seems to realize this. When the prince remarks that the children looking out the train's windows know what they are searching for, the switchman says, "They're lucky" (65).