The Little Prince Summary
The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry
Setting
The story of the little prince is mainly set in the Sahara desert
Main Characters
The Narrator - he is present throughout the book to tell the story of his friendship with the Little Prince and comment on what he has learned from him. He is very attracted to the Prince, largely because he is childlike, innocent, and pure. The narrator admits that he prefers the openness, honesty, and naiveté of children as compared to the pretensions and blindness of adults, who cannot see beyond the surface of life.
The Little Prince – he is the main character and protagonist in the novel. The novel tells of the story of his search for answers about what is important in life.
Plot Summary
The narrator is now a pilot who has crash-landed in a desert and introduces himself as a man who learned that adults lack imagination and understanding when he was a child. He encounters a small boy who asks him for a drawing of a sheep and obliges. The narrator calls the child the little prince. He learns that the boy comes from a very small planet, which the narrator believes to be asteroid B-612. Over the course of the next few days, the little prince tells the narrator about his life. On his asteroid-planet, the prince spends his time pulling up baobab seedlings, to stop them from growing big enough to surround the tiny planet. One day an anthropomorphic rose grows on the planet, and the prince loves her with all his heart. However, her vanity and demands become too much for the prince, and he leaves.
The prince travels to a series of asteroids, each featuring a grown-up who has been reduced to a function. The first is a king who wants obedience but has no subjects until the arrival of the prince. The sole resident of the next planet is a conceited man who wants nothing from the prince but flattery. The prince then meets a drunkard, who explains that he must drink to forget how ashamed he is of drinking. The fourth planet introduces the prince to a businessman, who maintains that he owns the stars, which makes it very important that he knows exactly how many stars there are.
The prince then encounters a lamplighter, who follows orders that require him to light a lamp each evening and put it out each morning. Finally, the prince comes to a planet inhabited by a geographer. However, the geographer knows nothing about his own planet, because his main function is to record what he learns from explorers. He asks the prince to describe his home planet and when the prince mentions the flower, the geographer says that flowers are not recorded because they are ephemeral. The geographer recommends that the little prince visit Earth.
The prince meets a snake On Earth, who says that he can return him to his home, and a flower, who tells him that people lack roots. He comes across a rose garden, and he finds it very depressing to learn that his beloved rose is not unique in the universe. A fox then tells him that if he establishes ties with it, they will be unique and a source of joy to each other. The narrator and little prince have now spent eight days in the desert and have run out of water.
The two walk through the desert in search of a well which they miraculously find. The little prince tells the narrator that he plans to return that night to his planet and flower and that now the stars will be meaningful to the narrator because he will know that his friend is living on one of them. He is required to allow the poisonous snake to bite him in order to return to his planet. The story resumes six years later. The narrator says that the prince’s body was missing in the morning, so he knows that he returned to his planet, and he wonders whether the sheep that he drew him ate his flower. He ends by imploring the reader to contact him if they ever spot the little prince.
Themes
- Relationships. The stories of both the pilot and the prince revolve around their relationships. The pilot entirely writes the story and makes his drawings in order to remember his relationship with the little prince. The little prince, in turn, tells the story of his journey in terms of the characters he has met along the way.
- Exploration. The pilot and the little prince are both explorers in a very literal sense but also in a figurative sense. Compared to those characters that inhabit only their own tiny planets and homes, the pilot and the prince have traveled and gained more perspective on life and the universe.
- Innocence. The pilot and the little prince both value innocence as a trait. For the pilot, the innocence of the little prince makes it important to protect and comfort him. For the little prince, the naiveté of his rose makes it important for him to return to his planet to protect her.