I: Introduction

Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) is a 1943 novella by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It was first published in English and French in the US that year, and published posthumously in France following liberation, as the Vichy Regime had banned it.

The novella was Saint-Exupéry’s most successful work, selling about 140 million copies worldwide, and thus being one of the best-selling books in history. It’s been translated into over 505 different languages and dialects worldwide, second only to the Bible among the most-translated works. Le Petit Prince has been adapted into many art forms and media, including audio recordings, radio plays, live stage, film, TV, ballet, and opera.

Here is a link to quotes from the novella in French and in English translation, and here is a link to a PDF of an English translation of the story.

II: Chapter One

Saint-Exupéry begins his tale by discussing a time, when he was six years old, that he was fascinated with how a boa constrictor eats its prey, swallowing it whole without chewing it, and needing six months to digest it. The boy decided to draw a boa constrictor having swallowed an elephant, but on showing the picture to some adults and asking if it scared them, they saw nothing scary about it, since it looked as if he’d simply drawn a hat!

In this moment, we see the beginning of a recurring theme in Le Petit Prince: the folly of adults when compared to the wisdom of a child. The boy tried a second drawing, this time showing the inside of the boa constrictor so the elephant could be clearly seen. Now, the adults advised him to forget about boa constrictors and what they eat, and instead focus on learning geography, history, arithmetic, and grammar. The folly of adults is the reversing of what’s important and what’s unimportant, so Saint-Exupéry gave up on the dream of being an artist at the age of six and would eventually become a pilot instead.

In meeting more adults over the years, he never changed his low opinion of them, since as a test, he’d show them his first picture, and they always saw only a hat.

III: Chapter Two

Here is where the story really begins, a fanciful rather than a logical one. Adult Saint-Exupéry had been living alone, with no one to talk to (loneliness is another major theme of the novella), until six years before his telling of his story, when he was flying his plane over the Sahara Desert and it crashed with a broken engine. Again, he found himself alone, with no passengers or mechanics to help him.

He had to fix his plane alone, he was miles away from civilization, and he hadn’t enough drinking water to last a week. This was a life-and-death situation. You can imagine the stress he was going through.

This predicament really happened to Saint-Exupéry and his copilot-navigator, André Prévot, in 1935. Though they’d survived the crash, they faced rapid dehydration in the intense desert heat, with limited food and drink. They both began to have vivid hallucinations. By the fourth day of their ordeal, a Bedouin on a camel found the two and saved them. Saint-Exupéry described their ordeal in his 1939 memoir, Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre des hommes).

The notion of having hallucinations while suffering in the desert heat can explain Saint-Exupéry seeing the little prince. While the boy is, on the one hand, a projection of the pilot having regressed to a childhood state (to ease his stress), the prince can also be seen as a Christ figure, a sinless child coming to Saint-Exupéry’s rescue, just in time.

One idea that you can glean from all of my posts involving my interpretation of the symbolism of the ouroboros (i.e., the dialectical relationship between opposites) is that at the moment of the most hellish despair, salvation can come. The prospect of certain death in the desert (hell, the bitten tail of the ouroboros) leads to Saint-Exupéry’s delivery from it (heaven, the biting head of the serpent). This delivery, this salvation, comes to the beleaguered pilot in the Christ-like form of the little prince.

If adult Christ was King of the Jews, then as a child he was a prince, the Prince of Peace, the little prince. We are instructed that we can attain the kingdom of heaven only as a child (Matthew 18:3), and so Saint-Exupéry must get back in touch with his original, naïve childlike nature. This is the purpose of the little prince entering the pilot’s life right at this moment…saving him in the most unlikely way.

On the morning of the second day of Saint-Exupéry’s ordeal, he wakes up to the voice of the boy asking him, of all things, to draw a sheep for him. The importance of this seemingly trivial, frivolous request, interrupting the man from his urgent work, exists on several levels. First, there’s the dialectic of prioritizing the trivial over the urgent, a child’s wisdom versus an adult’s. Second, the sheep makes us think of a lamb, the Lamb of God. Third, the man is being brought back to his childhood love of drawing…but drawing a peaceful, rather than a threatening, animal.

What makes the pilot’s ordeal in the story even worse than that of Saint-Exupéry and his copilot, Prévot, in the real-life ordeal is precisely the absence of a copilot, or anyone else, for that matter. The man is alone in the hot desert, far away from civilization, with a plane needing repairs, and he’s running out of drinking water. He could die, and he has nobody with him. This is the hell of death and loneliness.

Being alone only intensifies annihilation anxieties, leading one all the closer to psychotic panic, or what Wilfred Bion would have called a nameless dread. The pilot is sweltering in oppressive heat; this heat is an example of unpleasant stimuli that Bion would have called beta elements, stimuli that have to be processed, via alpha function, into alpha elements, or processed stimuli that one can cope with. (Read more about Bion’s and other psychoanalytic concepts here).

As I said above, the extremity of the pilot’s ordeal has forced him to regress to a childlike state, to a simpler frame of mind that doesn’t have to cope with complexity. Still, though, that complexity has to be coped with, and in his regressed, childlike state, the pilot needs someone to help him process the physical irritants (beta elements, the dehydrating heat) that he can’t deal with all alone. It’s out of the question, of course, that his mother could be there for him, the one who normally does the vicarious processing of her baby’s unpleasant stimuli via maternal reverie. The pilot must resort to something else.

As a result of his helplessness, loneliness, and urgent need to save his life, the pilot projects his inner child out into the external world in the form of the little prince, who is for the pilot what Bion would have called a bizarre object, a projected hallucination from his inner psychic world, sent out of him to keep him company in a desperate attempt to save his life.

With the bizarre object of the little prince come all the other bizarre objects: the tiny planets of the boy and the men the boy visits, the talking rose, the talking fox, and the talking serpent. This childlike fantasy world is the pilot’s escape from his desperation, his ordeal.

Getting him to draw a sheep several times, criticizing each drawing for this or that flaw, and finally accepting a drawing of a sheep ironically obscured in a box, are ways of helping the pilot process his childhood trauma of his original artwork having been rejected by adults. Had he only been encouraged to be an artist as a child and thus to express his emotions freely, he might have pursued that ambition, instead of becoming a pilot (symbolic of trying to fly away and escape everything), and thus finding himself in his current, life-threatening predicament. On a symbolic level, his danger in the desert represents his psychological crisis resulting from having abandoned and betrayed the true self (in Winnicott‘s sense) of his childhood. In this sense, the little prince has truly saved the pilot.

IV: Chapter Three

We get a sense of how small the planet is that the little prince comes from when he tells the pilot that the sheep he’s given him won’t need a rope to restrain it, since if it strays, it won’t be able to wander very far.

The smallness of the little prince’s planet–like that of the planets of the king, the vain man, the drunk, the businessman, the lamplighter, and the geographer–has different levels of meaning. On the one hand, it means the planets are like small islands in a universal ocean, isolated places of loneliness and alienation. Thus, they represent projections of the pilot’s loneliness as well as the loneliness of all of us. The small planets also represent a wish-fulfillment for a man stranded on a stretch of land far too large for his comfort. If only he, like the little prince, could fly away from his world to explore others and escape his danger, taken away with the help of a flight of migratory birds (Chapter Nine), instead of being stuck in a desert with his broken-down plane.

V: Chapter Four

Indeed, the little prince’s planet is as small as a house!

The pilot believes the boy’s planet is an asteroid known as B-612, discovered by a Turkish astronomer in 1909, whose discovery was ignored by the International Astronomical Congress because the Turk wore the traditional clothing of his country rather than European clothes. When the Turk was in European clothes, though, and he presented his discovery to the Congress again in 1920, the Westerners acknowledged him. We see in this an example of both Western prejudice as well as the addled adult mindset.

The pilot notes more examples of this mindset, in how adults seem to think that numbers and figures pertaining to anything are more important than, say, its beauty. These numbers and figures, of course, often represent monetary values for the adults: ‘Does his father make much money?’ or ‘I saw a house worth a million dollars […] What a pretty house!’ Such a mindset is a reflection of the capitalistic values we’ve all been taught, and so Saint-Exupéry’s critique of such values must have been among the reasons that the pro-Nazi Vichy government wouldn’t allow Le Petit Prince to be published. Fascism is hyper-capitalism: it exists to thwart the growth of socialism–more on that later.

Now that the little prince is out of the pilot’s life (it’s been six years, as of the telling of this story, that the little prince has returned to his planet), and so not only does the man miss the little boy, but he has revived his childhood interest in art, having bought a box of paints and some pencils, and not wanting to be interested in only numbers. He is getting older physically, but the return of the little prince to his planet really means, paradoxically, that the projection of the pilot’s inner child has returned to his heart.

VI: Chapter Five

In this chapter is a discussion of the issue of baobab trees. As soon as the little prince is aware of the growing of a bad plant like a baobab on his little planet, he must destroy it at once. For if he allows any baobabs to grow freely, they will take over his entire planet and the roots will burrow their way down. And on a small planet like his, the baobabs will wreck it entirely.

Researchers have contended that the baobabs represent Nazism’s attempt to dominate and destroy our Earth. Small wonder the Vichy government wouldn’t let Saint-Exupéry’s novella be published, and only upon France’s liberation from Nazi occupation would the story be published there.

Note that it isn’t enough to uproot this or that baobab, and then be content that one’s work is all done. The little prince tells the pilot that one must regularly go to work, every day after washing and cleaning, spotting the baobabs and distinguishing them from the similar-looking rosebushes, and pull the baobabs out as soon as they’re spotted as such.

The same vigilance must be applied to fascism…though few have heeded the warning since the end of WWII. The defeat of Nazi Germany, more the sacrifice of the Soviets than of Western Europe and North America by a long shot, was merely a setback for fascism. The far-right soon regrouped and acted clandestinely, seeming no different from the rosebush-liberals of the postwar world.

Ex-Nazis found lucrative employment in the US via Operation Paperclip, for no one was more effective at fighting ‘those lousy commie Reds’ than fanatically anti-socialist fascists during the height of the Cold War. These ex-Nazis worked in NASA, NATO, and West Germany, causing tensions in East Germany that necessitated the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, also known as the Anti-fascist Protection Wall, to keep Nazi espionage out, as well as to prevent brain-drain, or the loss of skillful engineers, scientists, etc. to the capitalist West through tempting salary offers.

Then there were Operations Aerodynamic and Gladio.

After all of that fascist terrorizing of the European left came the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the use of Ukrainian fascists by the US and NATO to provoke Russia into a needless and dangerous war, and the rise of Trump via Zionists like Biden. This is why we can never stop being mindful of baobab fascism.

But I digress.

Saint-Exupéry may have been born to an aristocratic family, but that doesn’t necessitate elitist, let alone fascist, sympathies. Peter Kropotkin was a Russian prince; he was also an anarcho-commmunist. Friedrich Engels was a bourgeois; he was also Karl Marx’s trusted friend and colleague.

But I digress again.

VII: Chapter Six

The little prince loves to watch sunsets, which on his tiny planet come forty-four times a day! Here on Earth, though, the boy will have to wait and wait.

The frequent sight of sunsets (and therefore also of sunrises) implies that the little prince has a far more conscious sense of how cyclical life is than we do. He watches sunsets when he is sad, implying that they have a therapeutic value for him. Seeing the coming darkness will bring to mind that the light will soon return.

We on Earth, on the other hand, must wait much longer for both the light and the dark, giving us the illusory feeling that both the good and the bad are closer to being permanent states of existence. The boy knows better, though.

VIII: Chapter Seven

The little prince wants to talk to the pilot about flowers, and if the sheep will eat flowers, but the pilot is terribly busy and stressed trying to repair his plane. The boy’s incessant questioning feels so annoying in its triviality.

When the boy asks what a flower’s thorns are for, the man snaps at him that it’s because flowers are cruel, which the prince can’t believe. The pilot’s words seem to imply that the little prince is being a cruel flower himself for pestering him in his life-or-death situation.

The boy is shocked that the man doesn’t think flowers are important, and that he is being just like any other adult, bereft of understanding. Recall that the little prince, as a Christ-figure, is trying to get the pilot to understand that, in order to save himself, the pilot must be as a child, to be an imitator of Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1), and therefore in agreeing that flowers are important the man is imitating the prince and being like a child.

The little prince speaks of a man on a planet he’s visited who thinks that doing sums is the only important thing in the world; this man has never smelled a flower or looked upon a star. He’s swollen with pride, like a balloon. He sounds like the businessman we’ll learn about in Chapter Thirteen, he who imagines all the stars out in space are his possessions, his accumulated wealth. If so, he counts the stars, but never looks on them. In other words, he has all the inverted values of a capitalist. He doesn’t care about beauty; he only cares about numbers as money-values.

The pilot feels ashamed to seem like a man similar to this businessman.

IX: Chapter Eight

The little prince tells the pilot about a special seed that was blown onto his planet from some other place. It gave birth to a new kind of shoot, making the prince look it over very closely. Was it a new kind of baobab? No.

It grew into a beautiful flower that captivated the boy’s heart. She was a speaking flower, and one that is rather vain, her words annoying him. She wanted him to attend to her needs–watering her, and putting a screen around her to protect her from gales. He feels that one shouldn’t listen to flowers, but rather just look at and smell them, and admire their beauty.

Apparently, the flower, a rose, was inspired by the author’s wife, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, who was from El Salvador, the country that inspired the little prince’s planet, with three volcanoes like those in her country, too (including the Santa Ana Volcano). I suppose we’re meant to assume by all of this that his wife was kind, yet petulant and vain as well.

The little prince’s leaving his planet and the rose behind, later to encounter the vast field of roses on Earth, is meant to represent Saint-Exupéry’s infidelity to Consuela, presumably during his travels by plane. In all of this, we can see again how the little prince is a projection of the pilot’s idealized version of himself, and is therefore also in turn a projection of Saint-Exupéry.

X: Chapter Nine

The little prince has left his planet, apparently, with the help of a flight of migratory birds, obviously symbolic of a plane for Exupéry to fly, and therefore a wish-fulfillment for the man stranded in the desert. The leaving can also represent the loss of innocence upon having grown up and having to face the adult world.

Before leaving, though, the boy’s had to be responsible and make sure his planet has been left in the best condition possible, which meant cleaning his three volcanoes, two active and one extinct, as well as pulling out the last of the baobab shoots and making sure his rose was safe from harm.

She says she won’t need the glass dome he’s used to put on her to protect her. She’ll enjoy the cool night air, and her thorns will protect her from any wild animals. Just as he is maturing and getting more responsible and self-reliant, so is she.

XI: Chapter Ten

In his travels in space, the little prince visits a number of asteroids not unlike his own in essence. The first of these has a king on it, and every other asteroid also has a solitary man living on it, each man in his own way demonstrating the foolishness of the adult mindset.

This adult absurdity is put into full effect here with a king who, all alone on his asteroid, rules over nobody. We see what a bad thing authoritarianism is when it’s presented in an absurd way. The king’s commands are pointless, illogical, and unenforceable. Quite an ironic position to get from an author who was born into an aristocratic family.

If the king can’t forbid the little prince to yawn, then he’ll command the boy to yawn. If the prince is too shy to yawn, then the king will command him sometimes to yawn, sometimes not to.

The king wants respect for his authority, and hates to be disobeyed, yet he is consummately ineffectual, thus demonstrating all by himself just how invalid regal authority is.

If the boy asks the king if he may do something, such as to sit down or ask a question, then the king commands him to do these things instead of simply permitting him to do them. The king is alone on his asteroid, yet he insists he rules over everything, even the stars, which he imagines must obey him in everything. In a while, we’ll be introduced to the businessman, who imagines the stars are his property.

The king says that authority rests on reason, and that he demands obedience because his orders are reasonable…yet the examples given above demonstrate how his orders are anything but reasonable.

The little prince wishes to leave the king’s little planet, yet the king forbids him to, offering to make the boy his minister. There being no one else on the asteroid, though, means that he as “minister” will have no one to judge. The king says the boy then can judge himself. The insists on leaving, yet the king offers to make him his ambassador. The prince leaves.

XII: Chapter Eleven

The second planet the little prince visits is inhabited by a vain man, who imagines the approaching boy to be an admirer. The prince considers the vain man’s hat to be an odd one, yet its owner says he raises it to anyone who praises hm…yet no one ever comes to his planet.

The vain man asks the little prince to clap his hands, which the boy does, causing the vain man to raise his hat “in a modest salute,” as if he were receiving applause for having put on an impressive performance.

The vain man, like the king, is demonstrating the absurdity of adults’ narcissistic affectations of greatness, when no such greatness is at all in evidence. He asks the boy if he thinks him “the handsomest, smartest, richest, and wisest man on the planet”…yet he is the only man on the planet, just as the king is alone on his planet, ruling over nobody.

Adult narcissism seems to stem from loneliness.

The prince leaves the planet.

XIII: Chapter Twelve

He arrives on a planet where a drunk lives. The little prince learns that this man drinks to help him forget how ashamed he feels…because he drinks!

The sadness of the drunk drives home the idea that it’s the loneliness of all of these adults that drives them to do the absurd things that they do. Hence, each man lives alone on his planet. The boy was alone on his, too, yet at least he had the sense to leave and look around, to find people.

Accordingly, he leaves the drunk’s planet, too.

XIV: Chapter Thirteen

The little prince arrives on the planet of the businessman, who is in the middle of doing sums. We see here especially how numbers are meant to represent monetary values, as I mentioned above, since the businessman is counting the stars.

He imagines he owns them simply because he was the first to think about owning them. He sees a difference between his owning them and a king ruling over them; we could see in this ‘difference’ a satirizing of the difference between capitalism and feudalism.

The businessman imagines that his ‘owning’ of the stars will make him rich…so he can ‘buy’ more stars! The little prince notes that the businessman’s avarice is based on the same kind of circular reasoning as the drunk’s shame is based on. One gropes for things only for the sake of groping for them.

The notion of justifying one’s ownership of a thing on the basis of having ‘discovered’ it is extended by the businessman into the realm of imperialism and settler-colonialism. He says, “When you discover an island that belongs to nobody, it is yours.” We all know what happened when Christopher Columbus discovered land that “belongs to nobody.”

The businessman’s ‘discovery’ of the stars, those islands in the sea of space, and his subsequent ‘owning’ of them, amassing his wealth through them, is the author satirizing capitalism by demonstrating the absurdity of accumulating capital for its own sake, claiming ownership of things that don’t belong to you.

He justifies his ownership of the stars further by calculating their totals, writing the totals on a little piece of paper, and putting the paper in a drawer to lock them in. This locking-away of the paper is his “bank.”

Like the king, the vain man, and the drunk, the businessman is all alone on his planet, engaging in his absurdity to compensate for his loneliness. The alienation caused by capitalism, fittingly, is felt most keenly by him. He pays little attention to anybody or anything other than his calculating.

The little prince observes that his own ownership of volcanoes and a flower are far more meaningful because he actually tends to their needs. The businessman, on the other hand, does nothing of use for the stars, just as any capitalist does little more than accumulating profits and overseeing those he overworks and underpays, his workers, who are the ones who are actually making the products and who thus should manage themselves and earn the full fruits of their labour.

The little prince leaves the businessman’s planet.

XV: Chapter Fourteen

The next planet the little prince comes to is one inhabited by a lamplighter. This planet is the smallest of them all, with only enough room for the lamplighter and his street lamp.

This man doesn’t seem to be engaging in absurd acts on first inspection, though, as has been the case with the previous four men, for lighting a street lamp does in itself have meaning. Still, his work is discovered to have plenty of absurdity in it.

The lamplighter’s planet is so small, and it has been rotating faster and faster over time, that morning and evening fall almost immediately the one after the other, so he must light up and put out the street light with hardly any rest in between.

And why? Because these are his orders.

Still, the boy sees good in the lamplighter, for “he cares for something besides himself.” The lonely little prince could also see a friend in the lamplighter, yet sadly, his planet is too small for both of them to live on, so the little prince leaves.

XVI: Chapter Fifteen

The next planet he lands on is one with a geographer, an elderly man who writes long books and imagines the approaching boy to be an explorer. Recall that geography has been one of the pilot’s studies, so when we discover the geographer’s absurdities, we will see another example of our narrator poking vicarious fun at himself.

One would think that this geographer would have an encyclopedic knowledge of every nook and cranny of his little planet, but he knows of no oceans on it, nor of any mountains, cities, rivers, or deserts. The reason for his ignorance, he says, is that he has no explorers to discover all of these things for him. He is only supposed to receive the explorers’ information, ask them questions about it, and write it all down.

Considering the little prince to be an explorer, the geographer is eager to hear the boy describe his planet. The prince tells of his volcanoes and his flower, though the geographer is not concerned with the latter, since it is “ephemeral.” Geography books are concerned only with what lasts forever on a planet, the geographer insists.

Similarly, he is not concerned with whether a volcano is extinct or if it lives. What matters to him is the mountain itself, which does not change. If the geographer records changing things in his books, then they’ll be out of date, sooner or later, and he can’t have that.

The little prince is saddened to learn that that which is ephemeral is “that which will die.” Since his flower is ephemeral, he fears for her death. In his heart, the boy knows better than the man: that which will die is far superior to that which is “everlasting,” since the ephemeral’s value is its rarity in the brevity of its life.

The geographer recommends that the little prince go next to the Earth, since good things have been said about the planet. So Earth is where the boy goes.

XVII: Chapter Sixteen

Ours is no ordinary planet, for instead of having only one king, one vain man, one drunk, one businessman, one lamplighter, and one geographer, there are many hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, and/or millions of each of these kinds of men on Earth. So many adult fools, all occupying one planet.

The narrator discusses the many lamplighters of the world before the invention of electricity.

XVIII: Chapter Seventeen

The narrator notes, yet again, another absurd thing that people often do: they lie to sound smart. While he acknowledges that people occupy very little space on Earth, grownups will think he’s lying about that, since they in their pride would prefer to believe that they take up a great deal of space here. “They think they are as large as baobabs.” As I discussed above, we should all know what that kind of poisonous pride can lead to.

When the little prince arrives on Earth, he’s surprised to find no people at all. Well, he is in the middle of a desert, after all. On a planet with so many people, the boy is still lonely.

He soon finds himself in a conversation with a snake. Since as a Christ-figure, the little prince could thus be a kind of second Adam (1 Corinthians 15:47, for example), then it is fitting that he have a conversation with a ‘second serpent’–not one that will tempt him (via Eve) into sin and death, but one that will give him genuine knowledge and wisdom.

The boy learns from the serpent that, while it is surely lonely to be in the desert, “It is also lonely among men.” One could be surrounded in a sea of people, yet still feel lonely if one doesn’t have any friends. Many people here on Earth have that experience. The boy’s encounter of many, each living alone on his own tiny little planet, is symbolic of that loneliness, isolation, and alienation we all feel, at least from time to time. The absurd behaviour of those men on their asteroids can be seen as at least representative of trauma responses to their loneliness.

The serpent says other things to suggest his links with the Biblical one. He says he’s “more powerful than the finger of a king”, suggesting he’s in a way like Satan, the god of this world (2 Corinthians 4:4). He also says, “Whoever I touch I send back to the dust that created them” (Genesis 3:19). This is a good serpent, though, and he won’t hurt the little prince, for he is pure and comes from a star. He is concerned about the boy, and he can help him.

XIX: Chapter Eighteen

The little prince walks across the desert and finds a flower with whom he has a conversation.

He asks the flower where the people are, but the flower has once seen a caravan go by, and it believes there are only six or seven people, all blown about by the winds, so who knows where they are. The people’s lack of roots “causes them many problems.”

That’s what we need: roots to hold us in place!

XX: Chapter Nineteen

The boy goes up to the top of a high mountain. Before, he knew only his three tiny volcanoes, going up just to his knees. He imagines he’ll be able to see the entire planet from this tall mountain, but he can see only “sharp, craggy peaks.”

He calls out, and hears only an echo for his answer. To hear only himself is like meeting the pilot, a lonely mirror of himself.

XXI: Chapter Twenty

This is the chapter in which the little prince, as I mentioned above, encounters a garden of roses. These roses look just like his flower, the one he left on his little planet. He’s saddened by how their likeness to his rose, his true love, makes her no longer unique, but common. He sees five thousand roses here!

Recall how I mentioned above that his flower represents the author’s wife, Consuela, and that these many flowers represent his extramarital affairs. Consuela, incidentally, had affairs of her own, which I suspect Saint-Exupéry knew of, or at least suspected, hence she, like the many roses here, must have seemed disappointingly “common” to him.

Since the little prince is an idealized version of Saint-Exupéry, then the replacement of the women in his life with flowers is an attempt to smooth over and mitigate his sins, as well as those of Consuela. We see, in the weeping of the little prince over his “common rose,” a touching moment revealing how, in spite of Saint-Exupéry’s naughtiness (and Consuela’s), he still loved her.

XXII: Chapter Twenty-one

As the little prince has been weeping, a fox appears. The two have a conversation, and the boy, feeling lonely, wishes to play with the fox.

The fox insists, however, that the prince tame it first. By “tame,” it means that the boy must “make a connection” with it, thus they would need each other, and be unique to each other. The boy thinks of his rose, and he tells the fox he thinks she’s tamed him. In this taming, it is apparent that his rose became “unique” to him…unlike now.

The fox doesn’t like its dull life because all it does is hunt chickens and is hunted by men, each of both types being all identical, lacking uniqueness, and thus their lives are boring; but if the little prince could tame the fox, then its life would be so much better. The boy’s and the fox’s lives would have meaning, because taming would make them connect with each other, and give each other uniqueness.

The little prince says, however, that he hasn’t the time to tame the fox, for he must look for friends and try to understand the ways of the Earth. The fox says it would be better to tame and be friends with it, for people, having no time for understanding, would rather buy things in shops. One cannot buy friendships, so people don’t have friends anymore…what a trenchant comment on how modern capitalism causes alienation.

To tame the fox, the boy will have to be very patient. Since ‘taming’ in this story essentially means making friends with others–calming down their wildness and making them civil with you–we see how important patience is in building relationships…a skill we have been losing more and more as we fetishize commodities in the shops mentioned above. It’s easier to have things than it is to have people, and to have people have us.

“Words can cause misunderstandings,” says the fox, which is part of why having patience in relationships is so hard.

And so in taming the fox, appearing for it at regular times and thus making it happy, the little prince has made friends with it and made it unique, not like a hundred thousand other foxes. Similarly, his rose is unique because of its taming, so it isn’t like all those other roses that seem so common. Because of this understanding, he can feel good about his rose again. One imagines that, in real life, this understanding must have helped Saint-Exupéry to reconcile himself to his wife, in spite of their troubled marriage.

We see most clearly through our hearts, the fox tells the little prince. Seeing through the heart must be the basis of a child’s wisdom, while seeing through the eyes seems to be the basis of an adult’s folly. What’s more, the boy’s rose is important because of the time he’s spent with her, the taming process.

The fox is believed to have been inspired by Saint-Exupéry’s intimate New York City friend, Silvia Hamilton Reinhardt, and she is the one who apparently gave the author the wisdom of seeing clearly with one’s heart. It’s ironic that the source of some of the novella’s wisdom, if it’s the true source, came from a paramour.

XXIII: Chapter Twenty-two

Next, the little prince meets a railway signalman. As the trains race past from one side to the other, the boy wonders why they’re in such a great hurry, to which the man answers that even the passengers don’t know why. The prince asks if the passengers were unhappy where they were before they took the train, and the signalman tells him, trenchantly, that one is never happy wherever one is; in other words, traveling anywhere will never bring happiness–one cannot find it by merely going out there…one must be content where one already is first. The little prince might well have just stayed on his planet with his rose. Oh, the folly of the pilot’s many flights!

One interesting point that the railway signalman makes is that the adult passengers are following nothing, just sleeping during the train rides, while it’s their children who have their faces pressed against the windows. The boy notes that only children know what they are looking for, implying the folly of the sleeping adults, who have let their sense of curiosity wane.

XXIV: Chapter Twenty-three

The little prince meets a merchant who sells small smart pills that can quench one’s thirst. If only the pilot were here! The little prince would use the time saved by taking the pills to go to a water fountain.

XXV: Chapter Twenty-four

As of this point in the boy’s telling of his story to the pilot, the latter has used up all of his drinking water. He is desperate, in his stress, to get water and repair his plane, so he has no use of the boy’s stories!

Since the little prince mentioned going to a water fountain, fortuitously just in time, rather than indulge in the hallucinatory wish-fulfillment of taking one of the merchant’s water-pills (whose saving of time is a further wish-fulfillment, alleviating the pilot’s anxiety about urgently finding water), he simply takes the pilot to look for such a fountain. They search until night falls, and thirst is making the man a little feverish.

At one point, the little prince remarks about how beautiful the desert is, and the pilot must agree. Then the boy says that the beauty of the desert comes from how a well is hiding within it.

The pilot has an epiphany on hearing this second observation. He realizes that what makes anything beautiful–a house, the stars, a desert–is something that stays invisible, hidden.

The boy falls asleep, and the man carries him. He realizes how valuable the little prince is. He looks at the boy and understands that what he sees is just a shell, but that what’s important about the little prince is invisible, hidden.

We see with our hearts, not with our eyes.

The little prince has tamed the pilot, who is no longer frantic about fixing his plane, and is patient in his growing thirst. Instead of being lonely, the pilot has a friend…if only a hallucinated projection of himself. He and the boy are unique to each other. The pilot understands that relationships are more important than things.

And it is at this point, at daybreak, when he has discovered, at last, a well.

XXVI: Chapter Twenty-five

The little prince seems to be recalling his conversation with the railway signalman when he says that people go on trains without knowing where they really want to go. They go in circles and get frustrated. It isn’t worth it. As I said above in my comment on Chapter Twenty-two, it doesn’t matter where one travels if one doesn’t have happiness. Was it worth the trouble for the boy to leave his planet? Have any of the pilot’s plane trips been worth it, if he’s been so lonely?

When they operate the well to draw water from it, the boy says, “The well is now awake, and it is singing.” He wishes to drink, too, but he’s always aware of beauty before his material needs.

As the boy drinks, the pilot comes to understand what the prince has been looking for: not just the nourishment of the water, but also forming bonds with people while seeking such material needs, and appreciating beauty along the way.

The little prince gets a picture of a muzzle for his sheep, drawn by the man so the boy’s flower will be safe from being eaten when he returns to his planet. Then the pilot must return to his plane and finish repairing it; after that, he must go back to the boy, as he in turn had to do to the fox, for this is part of being tamed: remembering your relationships with others.

XXVII: Chapter Twenty-six

The pilot returns to see the little prince, who is sitting on the top of a dilapidated old stone wall, with his feet dangling from it. The pilot notices that there is a yellow snake at the foot of the wall, one that could bite and thus kill the boy in less than thirty seconds. The prince tells it to go away, so he can get off of the wall. The pilot is getting his pistol out to shoot the snake, but it slithers away quickly.

He wonders about the boy speaking with snakes, but instead he learns that the little prince knows he has repaired his plane. So he can go home…and so can the boy.

The pilot knows already that he’ll miss the little prince when he is gone. He longs to hear the boy’s laugh. The prince has given the man so much wisdom; the boy has reawakened the child in the pilot.

Because of the child, the man has a way of valuing the stars that other adults haven’t. For scientists, the stars are trouble; for the businessman, they are wealth. For the pilot, because he knows the little prince is among them, the stars laugh for him.

The boy has given him the gift of happiness, of friendship, and of the end of loneliness. He doesn’t want to leave the prince.

XXVIII: Chapter Twenty-seven

Six years have gone by since the little prince left Earth.

Since he forgot to draw a leather strap for the muzzle for the sheep, the pilot wonders if the sheep has eaten the rose. Perhaps it’s safe, protected under its glass dome…or maybe there’s been an occasion when the boy has forgotten to put it on the rose, and the sheep has eaten it!

Whether the sheep has or hasn’t eaten the flower, everything changes if the answer to this question is yes, and this is important in a way no adult will ever understand, for it’s about caring deeply about a child’s happiness.

Saint-Exupéry ends his tale by twice drawing the spot in the desert where he met the little prince, and also where the boy left him. Thus, it is both the happiest and the saddest place in the world for the pilot.

Recall what I said in my commentary on Chapter Two, about the ouroboros, and that the head biting the tail represents where extreme opposites meet in a dialectical sense. In this instance, I mentioned heaven and hell: back in that chapter, hell led to heaven, the stress of facing certain death in the desert led to the pilot’s encounter with the Christ-like little prince; by the story’s end, though, happiness has led to sadness, in how the pilot has experienced a kind of enlightenment through the boy, and yet now he deeply misses the boy’s company.

After Buddhist-like enlightenment, the pilot feels himself thrown back into the samsara of attachment, wanting his little prince back. He thus asks his readers, if they should see the boy there in the desert, to let him know of the boy’s return, to comfort him.

XXIX: Conclusion

The complexities of life, the songs of innocence and of experience, make us adults forget the simple truths we knew as children: be kind to people, help those in need, appreciate friendships, weed out the bad things before they get worse, and prioritize what is beautiful over material gain. Don’t let pride turn you into a fool.

Thus it makes perfect sense that Saint-Exupéry wrote a novella, to remind adults of the above values, in the form of a children’s story.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince, France, Editions Gallimard, 1946