Who was your favorite character in the story? I fell
completely in love with … drumroll please
… its narrator.

Did you think I was going to say the little prince himself?
Oh, I like him just fine. But I adore the narrator. Note that I didn’t say
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry himself. I said the narrator – the nameless fictional
character who crashed his plane in the desert and met the little prince. Is he
Antoine himself? Nope. This isn’t an autobiography.

I love the narrator because he’s sly and witty, always
poking fun without being mean, and he takes quirky things seriously, or
pretends to. (I’m thinking of the danger posed to planets by baobabs.
Hysterical!) He’s an adult who refuses to be a “grown-up,” who has never left
behind the warmth, trust, openness, and imagination of childhood. Or at any
rate, that’s how he sees children, and he sees “grown-ups” as the complete
opposite.

The Little Prince
– the book, I mean – is a scathing argument against the nonsense believed by
“sophisticated” grown-ups in modern society. I think the narrator would say, if
asked, that society itself is nonsense. (By the way, “scathing” means boiling
hot, so hot it’ll burn you. But it’s a juicier word than “boiling” or
“burning.” “Sophisticated” is a fancy way of saying, well, “fancy,” or perhaps,
“cultured, refined, elegant, smart, educated.” It goes hand-in-hand with
“society.”)

I believe the narrator hands us the theme and main idea of
his tale on a silver platter on pages 2 and 3.

Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is exhausting
for children to have to provide explanations over and over again.

I have spent lots of time with grown-ups. I have seen them at close
range … which hasn’t much improved my opinion of them.

Through the little prince’s travels, we learn many things about
grown-ups. According to the narrator:

• They have no imagination. (Boa constrictor drawings.) 
• They won’t believe someone’s discoveries if they’re not
  wearing the right type of clothes. (The Turkish astronomer.) This is also a way
  of saying that grown-ups distrust people from different cultures.
• They won’t believe information that doesn’t include numbers.
  (Asteroid B-612.)
• They are obsessed with what’s “serious.” (The narrator’s
  jammed bolt and hammer.)
• They care about rank –who’s in charge and who’s not. (The
  king and his “subject.”)
• They are petty and self-centered, and want to be flattered.
  (The vain man and his “admirer.”)
• They are gloomy, sad, and self-destructive. (The drunkard.)
  
• They are so busy, and so obsessed with business
  (“busy-ness”) that they overlook beauty and truth. They care more about what
  they own than what makes it special. (The businessman.)
• They mindlessly follow orders, even senseless ones, wasting their
  lives away. (The lamplighter.)
• They only believe what’s written down, and prefer learning
  from books to going out and seeing what’s actually there. (The geographer.)
• They’re always in a hurry, without ever knowing what they’re
  looking for. (The railway switchman.)
• They’d rather buy something to save time than take their
  time enjoying an experience. (The salesclerk.) 

My goodness! Is there any hope for grown-ups, then, if even
part of what the narrator believes is true? I just had a terrible thought. Am I
a grown-up? I get older each year, it’s true, but I don’t want to be anything
like these grown-ups.

The Little Prince
was published in 1943, so probably written in, say, 1941 or 1942. You probably
know what was going on then: World War Two. Though the war included significant
fighting in the Pacific, World War Two devastated Europe. Antoine de
Saint-Exupéry was a French pilot who flew military missions for France during
the war. Hitler’s Germany occupied France – meaning France was under the
control of Germany, and German soldiers were stationed throughout the country –
from 1940 to 1944.  600,000 French people
– soldiers and civilians – died from combat, bombings, and other war crimes.
Worldwide, the numbers vary (uh-oh! Am I a grown-up obsessed with numbers?) but
anywhere from 50,000,000 to 80,000,000 people died from war causes. Fifty to eighty million.

The causes of the war could fill thousands of pages, but I’m
pretty sure Saint-Exupéry’s narrator saw it rather simply, like this: Vain,
petty, selfish men, obsessed with power and rank and money, wanted to rule over
everything. Like the story’s king, they persuaded people to obey them and
become subjects, partly by making them hate and fear cultures that weren’t
their own. Like the lamplighter, people mindlessly obeyed orders, even
self-destructive ones. Many were so busy and tired from making a living, and in
such a hurry doing it, that they lost sight of what’s beautiful and true in the
world, so they failed to stop what was happening. Under these conditions,
dictators rose, nations invaded nations, the world was sucked into a vicious war,
and millions of people died.

Not just died in the long-ago past, but were dying, right in
Saint-Exupéry’s beloved France, as he wrote this story.

This, I believe, is how the narrator saw things. Is it any wonder he had lost his faith in
grown-ups?

Can we blame him for thinking that if the men in charge were
less concerned with power, rank, money, and admiration, and that if others
hadn’t mindlessly obeyed their evil plans, the world might not be at war? Can
we blame him for believing that if grown-ups were more open to imagination, and
to smelling the perfume of a flower that’s right in front of them, and to
trusting the essential things that are invisible to the eyes but seen by the
heart (oh, how I love that fox!), that maybe his world could have been at
peace?

There may come times in your life, as there have in mine,
where the busy-ness of work, and the pressure to make money – we must eat,
after all – and the desire to fit in and be admired so that we can succeed,
crowd out the quiet, invisible things that matter most, like hope and belief in
what’s good and simple, kind and true. Like the grown-ups in the story, we can
forget who we once were, and what our imaginations taught us when we were
young. Thank goodness for children’s stories, which keep hope and imagination
alive forever. Perhaps that’s their most sacred job. It’s why I have never
stopped reading them, and why I have devoted my life to writing them.

The Little Prince
– the book – breaks my heart, in the best way. Perhaps the saddest line in the
entire story is at the very beginning of chapter two, on page three. “So I
lived all alone, without anyone I could really talk to, until I had to make a
crash landing in the Sahara Desert …” In that wide world of grown-ups, our nameless
narrator had never found a friend. But the little prince, who loved a flower
and tamed a fox and searched the cosmos for friendship, became his true friend.
Then, saddest of all, he was gone, but not gone forever, because the stars are
always there, like bells ringing. And even though the narrator can’t see his
friend, he loves him, which is the essential thing, invisible to the eyes but
seen by the heart, and—who knows?—perhaps felt, millions of miles away, by a
boy watering a flower, and protecting it from a sheep, among the stars.

Writing Prompts

© 2017 Julie Berry www.julieberrybooks.com