A Look at the Major Themes in The Little Prince

All that is essential is invisible, so said the Little Prince in Antoine Saint-Exupéry's novel, The Little Prince. Indeed, all that is essential is invisible. Within the text of the little prince, Saint-Exupery explores the travels of a little prince who lives on Asteroid 325, who travels the vast expanse of the universe in search of answers to the invisible. The little prince travels and crash lands in the Sahara Desert, a barren sandy lot for any traveler. He wanders through the desert until he comes upon a traveler with the same situation. The narrator has crashed landed in the Sahara, after his plane experiences technical difficulties and forces the narrator to plummet to the earth. As the narrator is bent on recovering his altitude, the little prince is bent on gaining the narrator's attention.

Once the narrator succumbs to the Little Prince's charms, he listens intently to the boy's story of travel and exploration. The Little Prince talks of his little planet, that has only three knee-high volcanoes and one four-thorn rose. He talks about how he rakes the volcanoes out every week to maintain them (because you never know!), and how much care he took raising the rose. He goes on to speak about how he decided to leave the little planet, because he needs to go in search of answers. Upon leaving, the little prince travels to six different planets, meeting six different types of adults. He finally gets to Earth, where he finds no one, because of the location where he landed.

He walks up the side of a mountain to see if he could see where all the people were, since on his planet, he could see everywhere at once. However, when he gets to the top, he only finds more mountains and an echo of his own words. Still wandering, he finds a snake who only speaks in riddles, because he can answer all of them. The Little Prince dismisses the snake and wanders on some more.

Eventually the Prince runs into a fox who request the prince tame him, so they can be friends. The Prince does so, hesitantly, but comes to adore and care for the fox. When the time comes for the prince to go, he chides the fox for being hurt, because it was the fox's idea for the prince to tame him. The fox concurs, stating that taming someone means giving a part of you to them.

The prince spends seven days with the pilot, conversing on his journey to Earth, when the pilot finally runs out of water. Fearful that his end is near, the pilot reproves the prince for not taking his situation seriously. It is then that the prince begins to cry, bemoaning his loneliness and responsibility to the rose he left behind. The narrator, ashamed and guilty, takes the little prince into his arms, and they begin to walk. They walk throughout the night, and in the morning, they find themselves at a well, with cool, clear water. The prince asks the narrator to leave him there, but return the next night. The narrator was apprehensive about leaving the prince there, but did as he instructed. When he returns the next night, the prince is speaking to the snake that he encountered in the desert some time ago.

Confused by the snake, the narrator tries to get the prince to explain why he was talking to the snake, but saddened, he only says that it was nothing. He asks the narrator to leave, because he didn't want the narrator to witness his return home, for fear that the shell of the boy he once was would terrify the narrator. Yet, the narrator remains, and watches as the snake bites the prince on the ankle. In a small hush, he falls to the ground, beneath the star he fell from.

The story of the Little Prince is a complex one, though it is written from an adult's remembrance of a child's perspective. The narrator bemoans the fact that he has lost his childhood to the grown up necessities of the world, and rebukes himself for ever giving up on his childhood ambitions of being an artist. As he finds himself shipwrecked in a desert, his plane in need of repair; this small detail speaks volume of the narrator, in terms of where he is in his life. The narrator is both lost and in need of repair, emotionally and spiritually. "Something in my plane's engine had broken, and since I had neither a mechanic nor passengers in the plane with me, I was preparing to undertake the difficult repair job by myself. For me it was a matter of life or death: I had only enough drinking water for eight days" (Saint-Exupery 3). The plane mirrors his current place in life, and with the introduction of the Little Prince, so begins the repair of the narrator's plane and spirit. At first, the narrator places greater value on the repair of the plane, rather than the repair of himself: a sign that he is still an adult, still focused on the very important details of a grown up life. It is only when he chides the Little Prince for his dismissal of serious, grown up needs that the narrator finally discovers the importance of perception.

The narrator's perception places greater priority on the plane's repair, while the Little Prince perceived the priority on the higher, the invisible. As an adult, the narrator only sees the tangible. Whatever can be touched and sensed is that of greater importance. The grind of daily life blinds grown ups to the fundamental aspects of be-ing. Adults forget to live and love wildly as children do. They are consumed with the need to work, fix, cook, clean, and insist upon performing the tasks that seemingly make life livable. "He doesn't realize the danger, I said to myself. He's never hungry or thirsty. A little sunlight is enough for him..." (Saint-Exupery 67). The irony of this is that what makes life livable is living, not working and controlling, but keeping the mind open and questioning. Adults assume that by doing whatever serious, very important details that need to be done actually keep them further from the true very important things. It keeps them from knowing who they truly are. When the narrator finally relents and begins to sympathize with the Little Prince is when he begins to understand the true nature of life; he begins to remember the invisible. He remembers that love is what maintains us all. Love is the invisible.

The Little Prince journeyed from his home planet because of the rose he planted and nurtured. However, like the narrator, he didn't understand his need to nurture until he met the fox. When the Little Prince meets the fox, the fox instructs the prince to tame him, so they could be friends. Taming creates a bond between the two of which remains, regardless of what becomes of the friends. "No one has tamed you and you haven't tamed anyone. You're the way my fox was. He was just a fox like a hundred thousand others. But I've made him my friend, and now he's the only fox in all the world" (Saint-Exupery 63). Just as the rose had tamed the prince, the prince tames the fox, creating a bond of understanding and nurturing. The fox reveals to the prince that taming a person requires you to leave a part of you with them, and when it is time for the prince to leave, there is a part of the fox that leaves with him. Not wanting to inflict pain on anyone, the prince feels guilty for causing the fox pain; after all, it was the fox's idea to be tamed. Yet, the fox explains that this is how relationships work. It is then that the prince understands his tie with the rose.

The prince's relationship with the rose and the narrator's desert plight force both parties to discover what it is that is missing in their lives. The prince needs to understand why he cares about the rose; he has a need to question and understand the invisible and sets out to do so. The narrator is blind to his own deficits, until he meets the prince, and then he realizes that he missed a good portion of his life because of his lack of child-like wonder. He accepted whatever came to him, without calling it into question. The narrator accepted the perception of every situation; he accepted them at face value, the very trait that he disliked in adults as a child. Through the Little Prince, he comes to understand that he had become exactly what he disliked. "Sometimes we have to be plunged into the darkness in order that we may see the wider picture. It is only in this extreme that we reach out and touch the unseen hand, waiting, ever patiently, to haul us out" (Parnell 4). He was an adult. Yet, when he began to view the world through the prince's eyes, his perception changed, just as the prince's perception changed with the taming of the fox.

The major theme of the story is perception. Saint-Exupéry uses the Little Prince and his travels as a means of exposing the adult view for all its faults. As adults, we release all childish games and notions, and accept the more structured, less fantastical world of the everyday. We do not explore past the tangible and are more apt to accept whatever is handed to us as reality. Just like the narrator, we busy ourselves with the mundane trivial aspects of work, instead of questioning our true purpose in life. "I just said whatever came into my mind. I'm busy here with something serious!" (Saint-Exupery 20). We do not take time to explore ourselves and our feelings, substituting them for material possessions and placing emotional ties on unemotional objects. The fact that the narrator is more interested in the repair of his plane and the eight day supply of water exemplifies the very dissociative nature adults have with reality. This need to control also keeps adults from being comfortable with whatever comes.

Children, on the other hand, never fear what happens next; they are more curious than scared. "Only children know what they are looking for, said the little prince. They spend their time on a rag doll and it becomes very important, and if it's taken away from them, they cry..." (Saint-Exupery 65). They have faith that the next event to occur will be just as adventurous and exciting as the last. His separation from faith keeps the narrator from allowing things to take their own course. He essentially becomes paralyzed with his own narrow-mindedness, working non-stop on the repairs, whereas the prince sits in the sand, fondly remembering his journeys. The juxtaposition of the prince and the narrator illustrates how closed off and narrow-minded adults become, since they shut out everything that is nonsensical and irrational.

Another theme of the Little Prince is the inevitability of death. When the prince finds the snake wandering in the desert, the snake only speaks in riddles. The prince questions this practice, to which the snake answers emphatically that he speaks in riddles because only he knows the answers. The image of the snake and his whimsical riddle speak alludes to the surety of death. In biblical term, the snake brings an end to life as we know it: the snake offered Eve the apple in the Garden of Eden, thus ending their carefree lives and then there were the snakes that roamed into Israel and killed the people of Moses. The symbolic snake provokes the fear of death; yet, the way Saint-Exupery writes the snake he uses the image as a metaphor for rebirth. "The serpent represents immortal energy and consciousness engaged in the field of time, constantly throwing off death and being born again. There is something tremendously terrifying about life when you look at it that way. And so the serpent carries in itself the sense of both the fascination and the terror of life" (Campbell 45). The only method that allows the prince to return to his planet is through the bite of the snake, which ascertains his death, but it gives him a renewed life on his home planet. The snake not only brings death, but offers life with it.

With the snake, the prince is able to shed off the knowledge he has gained while on his travels, including the time he spent with the six different adults on six different planets. The different adults display the different values adults place on life. First there was the king who needed to have control over everything and everyone. Then there was the vain man who always needed to be admired, followed by the drunkard who wanted to forget and the businessman who needed to own things. The prince then goes on to meet the lamplighter who obsessively keeps to his duties, the geographer who maps his planet, but doesn't know what it looks like and finally, the prince lands on Earth. The men the prince meets prior to the narrator are consumed with the seriousness of adult life, though the narrator is completely devoid of the seriousness.

The use of the seven men the prince meets on his travels is another biblical allusion. Saint-Exupery uses the seven men to personify the seven deadly sins. The king represents lust, as he lustful of power and must have someone to command. Pride controls the vain man. The drunkard is gluttonous with his drink, to forget whatever he needs to forget. The businessman is greedy with his ownership of everything. The lamplighter is envious of the tales the prince tells about sunsets, and the freedom he has from duties. The geographer, though steadfast in his typography, he is slothful in his exploration, and concedes exploration for others, not for him. With the narrator, he demonstrates wrath, in his impatience with the prince disregarding the direness of his situation.

This allusion is Saint-Exupery's attempt to demonstrate how innocent and unspoiled children are with their perception of the world. "But somehow they have that magic ability to suspend their troubles and simply let loose; to give themselves permission to be free, and to become totally absorbed in their play" (Dyer, 171).Children are willing to question and explore their environment, such as the prince did with each of the men he met. To Saint-Exupery, enlightenment came through exploration, which is not a habit adults make, yet children do, because they are so new to the world that they need to understand everything. They have no preconceived notions to limit them, whereas adults view the world with a skeptical eye.

It is this trait which mirrors the great minds that come before the Little Prince. The prince absorbs everything within his sights, questioning even the slightest inconsistency he meets. His inquisitive nature is similar to that of Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. To the prince, there were never enough whys to explain completely. To Darwin, there were never enough interpretations to be made about any singular item. Even Dr. Wayne Dyer discusses the freedoms that children have in his book The Sky's The Limit. "Inside each of us is still a wonderful child who would love to roll over and over in the grass, not worrying about getting clothes dirty or about what everyone else will think" (Dyer 174). These three men are just a few examples of brilliant thinkers who never gave up the ability to allow their selves the freedom to think and think as a child would, without inhibitions. Had Einstein thought his daydreaming would get him nowhere, as many of the adults around him suggested, then we may not have the wonderful theories and the understanding of relativity as we do now. We may not have had the understanding of evolution and the origins of species had Darwin not been free within him to go out and investigate the biology of nature.

The simple act of being childlike allowed the great minds of antiquity to press forward through the boundaries of a limited adult mind, and focus on the curiosities of life. "As you grow up, you form a mental imagine of who you are, based on your personal and cultural conditioning" (Tolle 22). Witnessing the greatness of these men and their works gives credence to the notion that an open mind can reach enlightenment. It is through this open mind that one can achieve greatness. "The surprising result of a nationwide inquiry among America's most eminent mathematicians, including Einstein, to find out their working methods, was that thinking 'plays only a subordinate part in the brief, decisive phase of the creative act itself" (Koestler 180). As a child opens his mind and frees himself from the decisive manner of adults, he allows himself greater freedom to create and achieve. It is this ability that Saint-Exupery cherished of children and allowed his prince to embody. A great deal can be learned from the Little Prince and how we can exist on this big planet, when we realize that we are all as rich as the prince, as long as we open our minds and free ourselves from the limitations of adulthood.

Works Cited

Campbell, Joseph (with Bill Moyers); The Power of MythNew York: Doubleday, 1988..

Dyer, Dr. Wayne, The Sky's The Limit. New York: Pocket Books, 1980.

Koestler Arthur, The Ghost in the Machine. London: Arkana, 1989.

Parnell, Charlotte, Meditation A Beginner's Guide. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2002.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine de; The Little Prince. New York: Harcourt, 1943.

Tolle, Eckhart, The Power of Now. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada: Namaste Publishing, 1999.