“The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is a classic that has been passed down from generation to generation since it was published in 1943. This children’s tale is more than a book for kids; “The Little Prince” is a lesson for life. I read this book my freshman year of high school for summer reading. I can’t believe it took me that long to read it. These are my reasons why I think everyone should read Saint-Exupéry’s unforgettable story.
Table of contents:
- Timeless
- Life Lessons
- Caring for Another
- Perspective
- Great Quotes
- Easy to Read
- For All Generations
1 Timeless
“The Little Prince” is a timeless tale because it touches upon childhood, imagination and the inevitability of growing up. The pilot in this story loses touch with that part of himself. It takes a plane-crash, a stay in the desert and some time with the little prince to find it again. While reading this story as a high school student, I never felt that it was written purely for kids. In fact, I reread it often and take away more messages each time.
2 Life Lessons
The life lessons taught in “The Little Prince” are immense. I recently was reading the book “One Child” by Torey Haden and was shocked to find elements of Saint-Exupéry’s story in it. There was even an excerpt from the book because the life lesson tied in was so great. You learn about love and laughter, compassion and companionship. This book is a must-read.
Opinion02122 I hated it! I have no idea why people like it....
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3 Caring for Another
One part of the book that sticks out to me is the piece with the rose. The little prince cares as best as he can for this very demanding rose. But he learns a bigger lesson than the few things he did to take care of her. He learns: “It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.” I can’t help but apply that same concept to various parts of my life, especially when I feel like I’ve lost something I cared about.
4 Perspective
The little prince offers a refreshing perspective to this pilot who has adapted to the adult-world and rules. But from their first encounter when the little prince demands that the pilot draw him a sheep, you can tell that things are going to turn out differently than anticipated in this tale. Sometimes I look up at the sky and I wonder if the little prince is out there with his sheep on his planet. I like doing this every so often because it opens up my imagination and shows me a new way of seeing things. “Look at the sky. Ask yourself: Has the sheep eaten the flower, yes or no? And you will see how everything changes.”
5 Great Quotes
There are some great quotes in “The Little Prince.” Anyone who knows me can always expect a inspiring, motivational or all-around great quote. This story is chock-full of them. My favorite quote has to be: “You - you alone will have the stars as no one else has them...In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night...You - only you - will have stars that can laugh.”
6 Easy to Read
“The Little Prince” is easy to read because you can pick it up and put it down as needed. Sometimes my schedule gets chaotic so it’s nice having a book that is deep yet able to be put on a shelf for a few weeks if I don’t have time to get around to it. The reading level isn’t hard at all so if you know or are learning another language, then you might consider reading it in that language. Currently, I am working on reading the original french version.
7 For All Generations
No matter how old you are, “The Little Prince” is a great story to read. You can read it to yourself or share it with your kids. It’s a wonderful way to bond through reading. You can even talk about it with friends and family who’ve read it. Plus, it’s awesome to casually slip in a reference to the story and see who catches it.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s children’s book “The Little Prince” is a must-read if you haven’t already. What is your favorite part? When did you first read it?
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Of all the books written in French over the past century, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “Le Petit Prince” is surely the best loved in the most tongues. This is very strange, because the book’s meanings—its purpose and intent and moral—still seem far from transparent, even seventy-five-plus years after its first appearance. Indeed, the startling thing, looking again at the first reviews of the book, is that, far from being welcomed as a necessary and beautiful parable, it bewildered and puzzled its readers. Among the early reviewers, only P. L. Travers—who had, with a symmetry that makes the nonbeliever shiver, written an equivalent myth for England in her Mary Poppins books—really grasped the book’s dimensions, or its importance.
Over time, the suffrage of readers has altered that conclusion, of course: a classic is a classic. But it has altered the conclusion without really changing the point. This year marks an efflorescence of attention, including a full-scale exhibition of Saint-Exupéry’s original artwork at the Morgan Library & Museum, in New York. But we are no closer to penetrating the central riddle: What is “The Little Prince” about?
Everyone knows the basic bones of the story: an aviator, downed in the desert and facing long odds of survival, encounters a strange young person, neither man nor really boy, who, it emerges over time, has travelled from his solitary home on a distant asteroid, where he lives alone with a single rose. The rose has made him so miserable that, in torment, he has taken advantage of a flock of birds to convey him to other planets. He is instructed by a wise if cautious fox, and by a sinister angel of death, the snake.
It took many years—and many readings—for this reader to begin to understand that the book is a war story. Not an allegory of war, rather, a fable of it, in which the central emotions of conflict—isolation, fear, and uncertainty—are alleviated only by intimate speech and love. But the “Petit Prince” is a war story in a very literal sense, too—everything about its making has to do not just with the onset of war but with the “strange defeat” of France, with the experience of Vichy and the Occupation. Saint-Exupéry’s sense of shame and confusion at the devastation led him to make a fable of abstract ideas set against specific loves. In this enterprise, he sang in unconscious harmony with the other great poets of the war’s loss, from J. D. Salinger—whose great post-war story, “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” shows us moral breakdown eased only by the speech of a lucid child—to his contemporary Albert Camus, who also took from the war the need to engage in a perpetual battle “between each man’s happiness and the illness of abstraction,” meaning the act of distancing real emotion from normal life.
* * *
We know the circumstances of the composition of “The Little Prince” in detail now, courtesy of Stacy Schiff’s fine biography, “Saint-Exupéry.” Escaped from Europe to an unhappy, monolingual exile in North America, engaged in petty but heated internecine warfare with the other exile and resisting groups (he had a poor opinion of DeGaulle, who, he wrongly thought, was setting the French against the French, rather than against the Germans), Saint-Exupéry wrote this most French of fables in Manhattan and Long Island. The book’s desert setting derives from the aviator Saint-Exupéry’s 1935 experience of having been lost for almost a week in the Arabian desert, with his memories of loneliness, hallucination, impending death (and enveloping beauty) in the desert realized on the page. The central love story of the Prince and Rose derives from his stormy love affair with his wife, Consuelo, from whom the rose takes her cough and her flightiness and her imperiousness and her sudden swoons. (While he had been lost in the desert in ’35, Schiff tells us, she had been publicly mourning his loss on her own ‘asteroid,’ her table at the Brasserie Lipp.) The desert and the rose—his life as an intrepid aviator and his life as a baffled lover—were his inspiration. But between those two experiences, skewering them, dividing them with a line, was the war.
In the deepest parts of his psyche, he had felt the loss of France not just as a loss of battle but also as a loss of meaning. The desert of the strange defeat was more bewildering than the desert of Libya had been; nothing any longer made sense. Saint-Ex’s own war was honorable: he flew with the GR II/33 reconnaissance squadron of the Armée de l’Air. And, after the bitter defeat, he fled Europe like so many other patriotic Frenchmen, travelling through Portugal and arriving in New York on the last day of 1940. But, as anyone who lived through it knew, what made the loss so traumatic was the sense that the entire underpinning of French civilization, not merely its armies, had come, so to speak, under the scrutiny of the gods and, with remarkable speed, collapsed.
Searching for the causes of that collapse, the most honest honorable minds—Marc Bloch and Camus among them—thought that the real fault lay in the French habit of abstraction. The French tradition that moved, and still moves, pragmatic questions about specific instances into a parallel paper universe in which the general theoretical question—the model—is what matters most had failed its makers. Certainly, one way of responding to the disaster was to search out some new set of abstractions, of overarching categories to replace those lost. But a more humane response was to engage in a ceaseless battle against all those abstractions that keep us from life as it is. No one put this better than the heroic Bloch himself: