Author: Antoine De Saint-Exupéry
This was a really beautiful book that is difficult to explain why it was so endearing. It’s a book written for kids, but is beloved by both kids and adults, and contains a lot of thought provoking themes that are worth thinking about for adult readers. I can’t wait to read it to my daughter when she is older.
Here is a brief overview of the story from The New Yorker
Everyone knows the basic bones of the story: an aviator, downed in the desert and facing long odds of survival, encounters a strange young person, neither man nor really boy, who, it emerges over time, has travelled from his solitary home on a distant asteroid, where he lives alone with a single rose. The rose has made him so miserable that, in torment, he has taken advantage of a flock of birds to convey him to other planets. He is instructed by a wise if cautious fox, and by a sinister angel of death, the snake.
As the little boy tells of his travels to different planets, he runs into adults who have very different “matters of consequence”, which the little prince doesn’t find very consequential at all.
He meets a King, who cares a lot about his power, but doesn’t have anyone to rule and isn’t an effective ruler even if he did. The king tries to convince the little prince to stay so he can rule him, but the boy declines.
The prince meets “a conceited man” on another planet who believes the prince should admire him. Like the king, the conceited man thinks he is more important than he really is.
On another planet, the prince meets a “tippler”, which in other words is an alcoholic. The prince does not spend much time here, and feels sorry for the man as the man explains the vicious cycle he is in of drinking to forget his shame, but becomes shameful again after drinking too much.
Then the prince meets a business man who is obsessed with counting the stars. The prince tries to get to the bottom of why he continues to count the stars, but fails to understand, and likes this person the least.
“I know a planet where there is a certain red-faced gentleman. He has never smelled a flower. He has never looked at a star. He has never loved anyone. He has never done anything in his life but add up figures. And all day he says over and over…‘I am busy with matters of consequence!’ And that makes him swell up with pride. But he is not a man—he is a mushroom!
The businessman counts stars as it gives him the satisfaction of owning them, since in his mind, the person who discovers them first owns them. So he spends all day counting his implied fortune. The businessman can be seen as a representation of many grown-ups. He is obsessed with something that is actually not important, and therefore neglects the truly meaningful and important things.
Finally, on his trips to other planets he meets a lamplighter who lights a lamp after sunset. The problem is, the planet is very small, so it has over 1400 sunsets a day. Despite this, the Little Prince likes this person the best. He also celebrates that the man gets to experience 1400 sunsets every day.
“It may be well that this man is absurd. But he is not so absurd as the king, the conceited man, the businessman, and the tippler. For at least his work has some meaning. When he lights his street lamp, it is as if he brought one more star to life, or one flower. When he puts out his lamp, he sends the flower, or the star, to sleep. That is a beautiful occupation. And since it is beautiful, it is truly useful.”
Here is some commentary on the ending of the book:
The ending of The Little Prince is super sad. There’s no two ways about that. The prince has left the Earth—it looked like he died when the snake bit him, but his body is nowhere to be found. The narrator’s made it out of the desert, but that seems like small potatoes compared to wondering what happened to the prince. And the sheep. And the flower. The narrator’s got questions that can’t ever be answered. Whether the sheep has eaten the flower or the flower is safe is a “great mystery”. This mystery, he says “alters everything”
But the ending also holds possibility for hope, because we don’t know exactly what happened. Perhaps (we hope!) the prince made it safely home to his flower. Perhaps he remembers to keep the sheep away from his flower. Perhaps all is well up there in Asteroid B-612.
That’s why, in the last two paragraphs of the book, the narrator turns to us readers and begs us to keep a look out for the prince, too.
I highly recommend this book.