The Little Prince: Great Books Explained

This is the best known line in a book that celebrates the curiosity and open-mindedness that comes naturally to  children, and laments the dullness, fixed ideas, and lack of imagination, that come naturally  if not inevitably to "Grand Personnes" - to adults. It idealises Purity and simplicity, and exposes  the futility of modern adult life, or indeed pretty much any adult life in any age. But the  essential meaning of The Little Prince is far from Clear.

Early reviews of the book suggest  that readers were bewildered and puzzled. With time it has become a classic, recognised as  a beautiful and Urgent Parable. Translated into 345 languages, it is one of the biggest  selling and most widely translated books of all time.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born in 1900 into an  aristocratic French family. The third of five children. Before his fourth birthday his father died, leaving the family finances in a precarious State.

At the age of 17 he tended to his blond-haired younger brother francois,  through his death from rheumatic fever. He wrote at the time that as his brother died: "He  did not cry out - he fell as gently as a young tree falls", a line he would later use to describe  the death of The Little Prince. Antoine went to a Naval Academy but twice failed the exams, before beginning his military service in a Cavalry Regiment.

But this was the dawn of the  age of flight. The Wright brothers made powered flight a reality in 1903, and by 1912 Saint-Exupéry had taken his first airplane ride, and decided he wanted to become a pilot. So he took private  flying lessons and eventually transferred from the Army to the Air Force, beginning A Love Affair  (amounting to an obsession) with flying that would last for the rest of his life.

It must be said  that he wasn't always the safest of pilots, and crashed a number of planes before he left the Air  Force and began a career as a pioneer of postal flights, in Africa and South America. That was was  when he began publishing his writings about his experiences. In 1931 he published the book  "Night Flight" to Great acclaim, and it would become an international bestseller.

That  same year he also married the writer and artist Consuelo Suncin. It was a tempestuous  marriage that would find expression in the little Prince's Rose. The only female character  in the book, and a representation of capricious and demanding lovers everywhere, but especially of Consuelo.

Despite his Fame, he craved adventure, and  in December 1935, Saint-Exupéry and his mechanic Navigator, crashed badly in the Libyan Desert, while  trying to break the Paris to Saigon speed record. Miraculously they survived the crash, but had  little idea of where they were, and their only supplies were some fruit, a flask of coffee,   a bit of chocolate, and a bottle of white wine. They were discovered half dead on the fourth day, dehydrated and hallucinating, by a passing Bedouin, who gave them water and saved their lives.

The  experience would become the central event in his 1939 Memoir, and he would use this adventure  as background to The Little Prince, in which an aviator is forced to land in the desert and  encounters a young boy wandering alone. After France signed an Armistice with Germany and  the country was overrun by Nazis, Saint-Exupéry went into Exile in North America escaping through Portugal. He wrote and illustrated The Little Prince while living in New York in mid to late 1942.

Like his Prince, the author and pilot was a soul in Exile. No surprise then that this is a story of love and loss, of  loyalty and separation, and of sacrifice. But flying was what he did, and despite a host  of injuries, he was desperate to fight with the free French, but was too old.

So he petitioned  relentlessly for exemption, until it was finally granted by General Dwight Eisenhower, and he  flew reconnaissance missions. Saint-Exupéry was by now a famous International figure, and his  participation in free French military efforts had enormous publicity value. The Little Prince  was published in the states in April 1943 but the book was banned in France by the Vichy regime, a government that collaborated with Nazi Germany.

All the illustrations in the book are integral to the story and were drawn by Saint-Exupéry. One character whose image doesn't actually  appear, is that of the pilot narrator. Saint-Exupéry did this drawing of him, beside his plane, but he cut  it from the final publication.

Probably because all the other characters are part of the little  Prince's Own Story, and to include the narrator would be to break the fourth wall, as it were,  between fantasy and reality. This book was written as much for adults as for children, and the author  probably rightly figured that mixing the fantasy characters with the grounded experience of the  protagonist, might be unacceptable to his grown-up readers. The Little Prince begins with an  account of how the pilot drew a picture when he was a child.

His picture (he called it  drawing number one), shows an elephant swallowed by a boa constrictor. Perfectly logical to him, but  to adults it was just a drawing of a hat, and they roundly mocked him. When his plane crash lands  in the desert and the Little Prince appears at his side asking him to draw a sheep - and then  declaring himself unsatisfied with the results, the pilot brings out his childhood drawing number one.

And this, the pilot tells us, is how he  finally found someone who understood his drawing, and how he made the acquaintance of The Little Prince. The Little Prince and the pilot/Aviator are  both in crisis. The Aviator will die if he doesn't repair his engine, and the boy had to leave his  Planet because of a misunderstanding with a rose.

They swap stories and Ponder issues of how  to "be" in this world. The prince tells the pilot that he left his tiny native Planet "asteroid b612"  and traveled to six other miniature worlds before coming to the planet Earth. The characters he  encounters in his travels, build a comprehensive (if incomplete), catalogue of human failings.

The king  without subjects to reign over. The conceited man, alone but revelling in flattery. The drunkard, drinking  to forget the shame of being drunk.

The businessman, who claims ownership of all the stars he can  count. The Lamplighter yearning for rest, but hurrying to keep up with the sunrises and sunsets,  on a planet that rotates once every minute, And the geographer who should know everything, but has yet  to receive trustworthy data from the explorers who must provide him with the information. And then, the  stranded Aviator - the author - who is only able to escape his predicament thanks to the intervention  and Ultimate Death (perhaps even self-sacrifice) of The Little Prince.

The Little Prince had taken  diligent care of his planet, and on the morning of his departure he carefully cleaned out his knee  high volcanoes - two active and one extinct - which he sweeps anyway because "you never know". He weeded  the invasive Baobob trees, whose Roots threaten the prince's Planet - seen as a metaphor for the threat  of Nazism and Fascism, and one of the reasons the Vichy government banned the book. The Little  Prince also cared deeply for a single rose, whose manipulative personality drives him to leave and  discover other worlds, so he hitches a ride with a flock of migrating birds, and visits six other  planets, each one even smaller than or barely larger than his own, before finally coming to Earth. 

He arrives in the Sahara Desert and is met only by a very enigmatic snake, so he assumes that Earth is uninhabited. The prince then climbs a mountain to find nothing but Rocky Peaks as far as the eye can see, echoing his own voice. He finds himself  in a garden planted with countless roses and realises that, though identical to the Rose he left  behind, they mean nothing to him.

This leaves him devastated, reliving his conflictual relationship  with his rose on asteroid b612. It takes a fox, the most intelligent character in the story, apart  of course from The Little Prince himself, to articulate our need for building relationships and our obligation to towards those we "tame". The fox sends The Little Prince to visit the Roses again, and Promises to make him a present of "a secret" when he returns.

Contemplating the mass of roses, The Little Prince realises that the most important part of a relationship is its uniqueness.  Its value is a reflection of what we invest in it. Finally, The Little Prince encounters a merchant selling  pills that quench thirst, and eliminate the need to drink water.

For The Little Prince, there is joy, and fulfillment,  and quality, in all of life's tasks, even the most mundane, and for him, time-saving devices do little  to improve our quality of life. Back in the desert the pilot/narrator is encouraged by The Little  Prince to leave his stricken aircraft, to go in search of water. They find a well, and The Aviator  is saved, at which point The Little Prince declares that it's time for him to leave.

Knowing that he  cannot take his body on the journey to the Stars, The Little Prince negotiates his own death. He  allows himself to be bitten by a venomous snake. When the pilot returns to the spot the next day  the little Prince's body is nowhere to be seen.

The Little Prince has become a classic  philosophical Fable, for both young and old, which shows us that having true wisdom means  understanding that there is no easy solution to Life's problems, and yet even the most hopeless  of circumstances can bring hope. As well as being a meditation on the meaning of beauty and life, it  is also a book about grief and loss. The book isn't afraid of suggesting that there is inherent  sadness in the world, or of pointing out the meaningless lives so many lead.

All grown-ups were  children once, but most of us have forgotten. For Saint-Exupéry curiosity and exploration are vital and it is imperative that we ask questions  of ourselves just as The Little Prince does. In April 1943 after publication of The Little Prince, Saint-Exupéry joins an American Convoy, and sailed to Algiers to join the free French Air  Force, flying reconnaissance missions, reporting on German troop movements.

On the 31st of  July 1944, he took off from Corsica in an unarmed Lockheed P38, and never returned. Like his  little prince he vanished Without a Trace.