The Little Prince
| Author | Antoine de Saint-Exupéry |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | French |
Publication date | 1943 |
The Little Prince (French: Le Petit Prince) is a novella by the French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It was first published in the United States in English and French in 1943. It was published in France after Saint-Exupéry went missing in 1944.
This book is a famous book from France. It is one of the world's best-selling books in history(with over 140 million copies sold) and has been translated into more than 300 languages.
The story is about a young prince who visits some planets, including earth, and thinks about important things in life like friendship and love.
Story
[change | change source]The narrator, who is a grown-up, talks about his childhood. When he was six years old, he read a book about wild animals in the jungle. Then he drew a picture of a snake eating an elephant. However, the grown-ups around him didn't understand, and they thought he had drawn a hat.
The narrator grew up and became a pilot. One day, his airplane had broken down in the Sahara. He met a little boy called "The Little Prince" who came from a small planet called asteroid B-612. He had a problem with not understanding a rose that grew on his planet, so he traveled to different planets to understand life more. He traveled to various planets and met different people there, including a king, a vain man, a businessman, a drunkard, a lamplighter, and a scholar of geography.
When he arrived on the earth, the little prince landed in an empty desert with no people around. He traveled around the earth, and saw different things. Eventually, he met a pilot, who is the narrator of the book. The two shared stories with each other and they became friends.
The character that helped the little prince understand life and love more clearly is the fox. The fox taught him about friendship, love and building trust. The fox said, "Building a relationship takes time and care. The time spent building the relationship makes it special. Once you build a relationship with something or someone, you must take care of it and once you build a strong connection, it can hurt."
The fox taught him that important things such as love and relationships cannot be seen with the eyes but must be felt with the heart.
The little prince, when he found many roses on the earth, thought that all roses are the same. But later he learned that all roses are not the same, and that it depends on the relationship one has with the rose, and how special and unique that relationship is. This helped him understand love better and to know how special his rose is.
At the end, the prince asked a snake to bite him. He said it would look like he was dead, but that he would actually go back to his home planet. Then the narrator fixed his airplane and left the Sahara.
The little prince said about his love, the rose: "She's not a general rose; she's the only rose in the universe. Only the heart can see the truth, and it will always stay with me."