Have you ever met him? Le Petit Prince? He’s a classic, I’m sure you’ve heard of him. Certainly you must’ve. He struts around in a cape and crown, demanding of grown-ups to draw him sheep. Have you never done so? Have you not drawn a sheep for the Little Prince? I am afraid, then, that you seem only concerned with matters of consequence. I admit to only meeting the prince by chance a couple or so weeks ago. He stumbled into my place of work and began assailing me with a myriad of questions. He said he was looking for something in particular: a book on gardening to attend to his rose. I pointed him in the direction where he might find such a book. He stared blankly back at me.

“Will you not come look with me?”

His directness took me aback. “As lovely as that would be, I have books to shelve and customers to attend to. I do not have time to sift through that section, in pursuit of a book to help you care for your single rose.”

These words seemed to hurt him deeply. 

“How can it be that you are hardly more grown than me, and already concerned with these ‘matters of consequence’! You are just another mushroom!” 

He threw his words at me and stormed off, getting lost in aisles of fantasy and illustration, quite out of the way. He emerged from the shelves, not with the sort of book which he was seeking, but a rather small thin paperback, once white, now faded into a crème. He placed it in front of me.

“Here. Maybe you’ll come to know real matters of consequence through this.”

The Little Prince 

Written and illustrated by 

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

I was startled to see, on the cover, a spitting sketch of the Little Prince, but before I could make this remark he was already storming his way out of the store. 

The Little Prince is a story known to all, if not through personal reading then by name alone. Despite being primarily cataloged as a work of children’s literature, the Little Prince’s fable lends itself to many genres, including fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction, and philosophical fiction. The symbolism within the story is layered on so thick that a critic could spend their entire career sifting through it and never unearth all its meaning. 

The story, in its plainest outline, tells the tale of an aviator who crash-lands in the desert where he encounters a strange boy claiming to have flown in from a distant planet no larger than a house. The two become friends as the Little Prince tells the man the story of his journey, beginning with his departure from his planet and ending at the present moment in the desert. His objective in traveling to Earth was to find a means to protect a most unique flower on his planet from any assailant (he specifically had sheep in mind). The Little Prince’s frequent queries are readily dismissed in his recounting, as grown-ups deem their own concerns as “matters of consequence,” a distinction that offends the Little Prince. Part of the deeper story pays homage to the innocence of children, their unending curiosities, and their undying passions. 

Additionally, many connections can be made between the events in the story and the life of the author. Saint-Exupéry was an aviator who, like the narrator, crashed down in the Sahara desert. He reportedly hallucinated creatures while stranded in the desert before being rescued. Furthermore, The Little Prince’s beloved rose is credited to represent the author’s complicated relationship with his wife. One of the most striking proclamations from the Little Prince is prompted by his love for this flower:

“If some one loves a flower, of which just one single blossom grows in all the millions and millions of stars, it is enough to make him happy just to look at the stars. He can say to himself: ‘Somewhere, my flower is there . . .’ But if the sheep eats the flower, in one moment all his stars will be darkened . . . And you think that is not important!”

He could not say anything more. His words were choked by sobbing.

The image of the Little Prince looking at the night sky and thinking of his flower reminds me of lovers, miles apart, that feel connected knowing that they can, at the same time, be looking at the same moon and stars. 

There is a constant tone of longing throughout the work, an emotion known intimately around the world at the time of publication. Written in France by a World War II pilot in the year 1943, it’s logical to seek out symbols of war. These symbols can be found in the emotional trajectory of the story. It begins with loss and loneliness that is alleviated by companionship and love, only to be suddenly stripped away again by implied suicide.

Each of these deeper connections only scratch the surface of The Little Prince’s treasure trove of symbols. The inhabitants of pit-stop planets mean something. The taming of the fox means something. The trains coming and going mean something. The somethings come together and assemble a bigger something that morphs in its intangibility, representing feelings more than moments. 

I finished the story the same day I received it. The day immediately following, I saw the Little Prince again. He came right up to the front counter and asked me what I thought of his story. I told him about all my findings. 

He interrupted me, enraged. “War story? Love affair? Suicide note? You didn’t even read my story! Those things weren’t in it at all! It is the story of me trying to protect my rose! How dare you insert these blasphemous interpretations! You must read it again! Clearly you were not paying much attention the first time!”

Before I could rush to any explanation he was, once again, storming out in a fit of rage. I was left to ponder the words he dumped in my lap. I spent all this time decrypting a story and, in doing so, disregarded everything that the Little Prince stands for as a character, as has every scholar who’s ever taken a stab at dissecting this classic work of literature. Ashamed by my grown-up approach, I began to reread the story in the way the Little Prince would have wanted. 

Upon turning past that final page (the second time around), my words to you are this: if ever you one day meet the Little Prince and he places his story into your hands, read it twice. The first time, dive head-first into all the philosophical double-meanings and extended metaphors it has to offer. But the second time, read as you would when you were a child, where a rose is a rose and a boy lost in the desert is just a young alien trying to find his way home. 

October 2021