The Little Prince book
Literature
book the little prince
The Little Prince is a short story by the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The story focuses on a little prince who makes a journey through the universe. On this trip, he discovers the strange way adults see life and understands the value of love and friendship.
The Little Prince is considered one of the best books of all time and a contemporary classic of universal literature. Due to its simple and direct style, it has been considered a children's book. However, its reflective character on life, society, and love, makes it a story of interest to everyone.
It was published in April 1943 in the United States, since, due to World War II, the work could not be printed in France. The book has been translated into dozens of languages and adapted to various formats, such as theater, cinema, animated series, ballet, and opera.
Summary of The Little Prince
The Little Prince tells the story of a pilot who, while trying to repair his damaged plane in the middle of the Sahara desert, runs into a little prince from the asteroid B 612, who insistently asks him to draw a lamb and never forgets a question.
The pilot will begin to discover the fascinating story of the little prince, which begins on his asteroid, where he lived with three volcanoes and amused himself by pulling weeds and watching sunsets.
One day, on the ground of the asteroid, a flower is born. The little prince takes care of it and attends to it with dedication, but the flower is dramatic and capricious, and this annoys him. So, he decides to leave his home and embark on a journey through the universe in search of a friend.
On the journey, which will take the little prince to visit several asteroids until he reaches Earth, he will meet a diverse group of eccentric characters who convince him how strange the world of adults is, always so busy with serious and important matters that they forget to enjoy life.
On Earth, the little prince will come into contact with animals, flowers, and people. It will be there where, before finding the pilot, he will meet the fox, who will reveal to him the importance of friendship and the value of the love he feels towards his flower. It will be the nostalgia for her and the disappointment that the adult world causes him that will motivate him to return to his planet.
Analysis of The Little Prince
The essential is invisible to the eyes.
This sentence is said by the fox to the little prince. It means that the true value of things escapes the eyes, but not the heart. It is a reflection on those things that, sometimes, we are not able to see, because we observe them with a superficial gaze. The most important thing is not always obvious. This is a constant in the book, which calls us to see beyond appearances.
See more about What is essential and is invisible to the eye.
It was the time you spent with your rose that made it so important.
The sentence is said by the fox to the little prince. It means that relationships and affections are cultivated over time and that is what makes them valuable to us. Reflect on the importance of spending time on the things we love and on the responsibility of being constant in our relationships, whether friendship or love.
If you come, for example, at four in the afternoon, from three o'clock I will begin to be happy.
This sentence is said by the fox to the little prince. It expresses the happiness that friendship produces in us and how this affection is shown in the imperative need that we feel to see someone we love. It also talks about the importance of meeting the expectations of the people we love and the responsibility we assume before them.
You are responsible forever for what you have tamed.
The sentence is said by the fox to the little prince. It means that when a relationship, friendship, or love has been cultivated with another person, this makes us co-responsible for the progress of that relationship. It reminds us that when we have "tamed" a relationship with another person, we have become very important to each other, and we cannot abandon each other.
You just have to ask each one what each one can give.
This sentence is said by the king to the little prince. The king was incapable of ordering something that could not be fulfilled. He said that to be obeyed, he only had to command what others were willing to do. It is a phrase that talks about the importance of kindness in power.
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characters and items
The Little Prince
The little prince is the main character of the story. He lives on an asteroid, which he left to travel the universe in search of a friend.
When he arrives on Earth he meets the pilot, to whom he tells his impressions about the world of adults, always so busy with their own business, and their inability to give value to the things that are really important in life.
The little prince represents the child that we all carry inside and the feelings of love, hope, and innocence that feed our lives. His way of seeing the world motivates the pilot to write the story to reunite with the child he once was.
The pilot
The pilot is the narrator of the story of the little prince. He meets him when his plane breaks down in the middle of the Sahara desert.
When he was a child he wanted to be a cartoonist, but adults dissuaded him from his purpose. He finds a friend in the little prince, who understands his drawings and teaches him, with his stories and his actions, the true value of things. The pilot portrays the importance of following our dreams.
The flower
The flower is the little prince's love object, but his relationship with it is difficult. Although he fervently cares for her and protects her, she is proud, melodramatic, and capricious. Her behavior confuses him to such an extent that he decides to embark on a journey through the universe to separate from her.
It is his memory that makes the little prince return to his planet. It symbolizes love, which must be cultivated and cared for every day.
The Fox
The fox is the first friend the little prince meets on his journey. He explains to her that friendship is a domestication process, in which two people establish a unique relationship, where both need each other.
It is he who teaches the little prince the value of friendship and who leads him to reflect on the relationship he had cultivated with his flower since he loved it.
The lamb and the box
The little prince asks the pilot to draw him a lamb, but he is not satisfied with the result. The pilot draws a box and tells the one inside that there is his lamb. Then the little prince admits that this was what he wanted. This drawing represents the power of imagination.
The elephant inside the boa
The narrator tells that when he was a child, he drew an elephant inside a boa, but the adults did not understand the drawing, they hardly saw a hat, so they advised him to stop drawing and dedicate himself to important things. Due to this, the narrator forgets his career as a cartoonist and dedicates himself to that of a pilot.
Years later, when he meets the little prince, he shows him the drawing and he understands it instantly. This drawing symbolizes how deceptive appearances can be and how the misunderstanding of others can motivate us to make wrong decisions.
the astronomer
A Turkish astronomer was the discoverer of the asteroid B 612, home of the little prince. However, when he presented his discovery at a large congress of astronomers, no one gave credit to his finding because of his clothing.
Years later, he made the presentation again elegantly dressed in European style, and, this time, everyone accepted his discovery.
In this sense, it makes us reflect on the exaggerated importance that we sometimes attach to people's appearance, leading us to judge them negatively, without listening to them and without truly knowing them.
baobabs
Every day, the little prince cleans the soil of his planet of weeds, preventing one of them from being a baobab.
The baobabs worry him because they are trees that can grow too big, to the point of destroying his little planet.
The little prince's discipline shows the importance of preventive thinking and tackling problems early before they become too big.
The snake
The snake is the first character the little prince talks to on Earth. He is a wise character, who speaks in an enigmatic way. In this sense, he has clear biblical resonances. He will be the one to send him back home, thanks to his poisonous bite.
The King
The king is a character who claims to rule the entire universe. Despite his eagerness to command, he is a good-hearted man: he only gives orders that others can comply with.
As the king can't get the little prince to stay on his planet to serve him as a subject, he appoints him his ambassador. In this way, he represents the absurd need for the power of men.
The drunk
The drunkard is a character who drinks to forget the shame of drinking. The little prince is saddened by him and amazed by his attitude. He represents those people who, to escape from reality, take refuge in a vice.
The businessman
The businessman is too busy with his accounts to attend to the little prince. He thinks that he is rich and that he owns all the stars in the universe. He is a symbol of adults who spend their lives enslaved by the idea of a ridiculous possession and are unable to recognize the value of the life they are wasting.
the lamplighter
The lamplighter is one of the characters that the little prince likes the most because at least he performs a useful task. His objective is to light a lantern at night that he must then turn off during the day. However, his world spins so fast that his work begins to become exhausting. He represents people who thoughtlessly indulge in their tasks, without reflecting on the meaning of their actions.
the geographer
He is a man with a lot of knowledge about geography. When the little prince questions him about the geography of his own planet, he discovers that, paradoxically, he knows nothing about it.
This character represents the inability to realize the value of what is within our reach, of our reality. It is he who reveals to the little prince the ephemeral condition of the flowers, which makes him very sad.
the vain
The vain one is an eccentric character, who lives alone on his planet, but who has an enormous need to be admired and praised by others. He is a representation of those who only care about what others think of them.
About Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of The Little Prince, was born in Lyon, France, in 1900, and died on the island of Riou in 1944. He was an aviator and writer. Part of his experience as a pilot inspired him to write The Little Prince. Most of his literary production was written during his exile in the United States, a country to which he was assigned with the mission of convincing the US government to declare war on Germany during World War II.
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