“All grownups were once children - though few of them remember it”: The Little Prince and the Absurdity of Adulthood
Last week, the King’s World Literature Society kicked off their first book club of the year with an introduction to The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. As someone who had only ever heard mention of The Little Prince as a literary masterpiece, you can imagine my surprise when I showed up to my local Waterstones and was pointed to the kid’s section by a rather confused-looking bookseller. It didn’t take long, however, before I was drawn in and mesmerised by the charm and wonder of the prince’s host of cosmic adventures.
The book begins with a foreword from Saint-Exupery, wherein he dedicates the text to his long-standing friend Leon Worth, or more accurately, to Leon Worth when he was a little boy - “for all grownups were once children (though few of them remember it)”. I think this foreword is extremely significant for understanding Saint-Exupery’s intended audience, as well the message of the book as a whole - for, in spite of the illustrations and simple language, there is something in the book which appeals to us all. The book is intended both for children, and for the inner child we often stifle as we grow up.
The Little Prince follows the account of a narrator who crash lands in the Sahara, and who amid desperate efforts to fix his plane’s engine, stumbles across a little prince who fell from the sky. The prince is pure and childish, not understanding the narrator’s preoccupation with the plane, and takes great pleasure in seemingly trivial things (like flowers and drawings of sheep). Slowly becoming enthralled by the prince’s purity, the narrator asks him how he came to be here, and the book recounts the prince’s adventures, from his own small planet in the stars, to countless inhabited asteroids, and finally to the Earth.
The prince reveals that he left behind a beautiful rose on his planet - a rose he had tended and fallen in love with, but which he abandoned in his naivety. As he travels from planet to planet, meeting king’s with no subjects, geographers with no maps, and businessmen who lay claim to the stars, he comes to find that adults are so very strange in their obsessions that they seem not to realize what really matters in the world. Throughout the course of his adventures, the prince comes to miss his planet and his rose all the more, longing one day soon to return to his world.
The Little Prince is a meditation on the absurdity of adulthood and of the spark of wonder which often fizzles out as we grow up. It is a reminder for us who get lost in our heads and our day to day lives to look up once in a while, and remember what it truly means to be alive. It is a reminder that the value of life is not derived from wealth or power or profession, but rather from the simple things we overlook - the wonder of the stars, the flowers in a field, the people around us.
The fox warns the little prince that “one runs the risk of crying a bit if one allows oneself to be tamed”, and I can say with certainty that The Little Prince has undeniably tamed me. I must admit that I felt the tears welling when I turned the final page, already missing his simple attitude regarding our world.
Edited by Dan Ramos Lay, Literature Editor
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