Quote 21
As the little prince watched him, he felt that he loved this lamplighter who was so faithful to his orders. He remembered the sunsets which he himself had gone to seek, in other days, merely by pulling up his chair; and he wanted to help his friend. (14.24)
The prince has barely known the lamplighter for any time at all, but he already knows that he wants to be friends with him. In fact, he’s already decided that they’re friends and is now thinking about how he can help the lamplighter out. Although it’s only been part of a short chapter, the prince “fe[els] that he love[s] this lamplighter.” Why do you think this is so?
Quote 22
Once again I felt myself frozen by the sense of something irreparable. And I knew that I could not bear the thought of never hearing that laughter any more. For me, it was like a spring of fresh water in the desert. (26.31)
“Fresh water in the desert” is something you can’t do without—something you need to survive; it’s what you dream about in its absence. And all of that value and need sums up what the prince means to the narrator.
Quote 23
My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. But since the grown-ups were not able to understand it, I made another drawing: I drew the inside of the boa constrictor, so that the grown-ups could see it clearly. They always need to have things explained. (1.6)
Usually, it would be the adults who say kids need to “see” more “clearly” in order to understand how things are. Instead, here we have a young person who thinks the adults are the ones who “need to have things explained.” What do you think is different between the way the young narrator and the adults see the world?
Quote 24
Whenever I met one of them [the grown-ups] who seemed to me at all clear-sighted, I tried the experiment of showing him my Drawing Number One, which I have always kept. I would try to find out, so, if this was a person of true understanding. But, whoever it was, he, or she, would always say:
“That is a hat.”
Then I would never talk to that person about boa constrictors, or primeval forests, or stars. (1.10-12)
The narrator ends up using his drawing as a friendship test for new people he meets. Although the narrator doesn’t know it yet, he’s asking people to see the drawing in the same way that the fox tells the prince to see the world: with the heart, not the eyes. Do you agree?
Quote 25
As each day passed I would learn, in our talk, something about the little prince’s planet, his departure from it, his journey. The information would come very slowly, as it might chance to fall from his thoughts. It was in this way that I heard, on the third day, about the catastrophe of the baobabs. (5.1)
This shows us how the prince communicates. Instead of spilling his guts out, he reveals information about himself slowly. Why do you think this is? Because he doesn’t trust words? Because he doesn’t like talking about himself?
Quote 26
“Perhaps it was because of the anniversary?”
The little prince flushed once more. He never answered questions—but when one flushes does that not mean “Yes”?
“Ah,” I said to him, “I am a little frightened—” (25.43-5)
Like the fox, who wants to communicate without words, the narrator reads the prince’s expressions in order to figure out what’s going on with his friend. He interprets the flush (which is like a blush) as a “yes.” So, the prince answers the narrator’s question, perhaps, without realizing it.
Quote 27
Look up at the sky. Ask yourselves: Is it yes or no? Has the sheep eaten the flower? And you will see how everything changes…
And no grown-up will ever understand that this is a matter of so much importance! (27.8-9)
At the end of The Little Prince, the narrator puts the burden of interpretation on us readers. That’s a fancy way of saying that from this point on, it’s up to us to figure out what has happened in answer to these questions. In other words, the narrator asks us to finish the story. When we “look up at the sky,” what do we see? Is it a happy ending or a sad one? The other thing to remember is that not everybody will “understand” our answers or their significance—especially not grown-ups.
Quote 28
This is, to me, the loveliest and saddest landscape in the world. It is the same as that on page 88, but I have drawn it again to impress it on your memory. It is here that the little prince appeared on Earth, and disappeared. (Epilogue 1)
One more time, the narrator relies on images instead of words to make us understand. He thinks we’ll get a better understanding of the landscape if we look at the pictures he drew, rather than just reading what he has to say about it. Why do you think he’s more confident about the pictures than about the description he builds with words?
Quote 29
Wait for a time, exactly under the star. Then, if a little man appears who laughs, who has golden hair and who refuses to answer questions, you will know who he is. If this should happen, please comfort me. Send me word that he has come back. (Epilogue 2)
Of all the things that show the little prince to be himself (golden hair, laughing, and so on), one of the key ones is his “refus[al] to answer questions.” Why do you think this is an important characteristic of the prince?
Quote 30
That is why, at the age of six, I gave up what might have been a magnificent career as a painter. I had been disheartened by the failure of my Drawing Number One and my Drawing Number Two. Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them. (1.7)
In this paragraph, the traditional ideas of experience and innocence get turned upside down. Actually this book seems to do that a lot! The young characters are the ones with the most wisdom, and it’s the grown-ups who, over and over again, appear not to “understand anything.”
Quote 31
They [grown-ups] are like that. One must not hold it against them. Children should always show great forbearance toward grown-up people. (4.10)
Sound familiar? This is one of the ideas we hear again and again in this book—the idea that children know more and have a greater understanding than grown-ups do. In the narrator’s opinion, this means that children basically have a responsibility to “show great forbearance,” which is a fancy way of saying “be patient with the grown-ups” rather than getting upset when the grown-ups display their ignorance.
Quote 32
But the flower was not satisfied to complete the preparations for her beauty in the shelter of her green chamber. She chose her colours with the greatest care. She dressed herself slowly. She adjusted her petals one by one. She did not wish to go out into the world all rumpled, like the field poppies. It was only in the full radiance of her beauty that she wished to appear. (8.2)
The flower is sweet and cute in her naiveté. She doesn’t realize that there are grander, more “adult” concerns out in the world. She doesn’t realize that there are so many other flowers just like her.
Quote 33
The grown-ups, to be sure, will not believe you when you tell them that. They imagine that they fill a great deal of space. They fancy themselves as important as the baobabs. You should advise them, then, to make their own calculations. They adore figures, and that will please them. But do not waste your time on this extra task. It is unnecessary. You have, I know, confidence in me. (17.2)
Once again, the narrator compares grown-ups unfavorably to children. He describes adults in the same way that adults sometimes describe children, saying that they’re almost touchingly naïve in their mistaken belief systems.
Quote 34
The grown-ups’ response, this time, was to advise me to lay aside my drawings of boa constrictors, whether from the inside or the outside, and devote myself instead to geography, history, arithmetic and grammar. That is why, at the age of six, I gave up what might have been a magnificent career as a painter. (1.7)
It’s not enough to simply decide you want to do something, like become a great painter, and then stick with it. You also need encouragement and backing up, for starters. When the narrator was a little kid, all the grown-ups he knew told him that he wasn’t good at drawing and that his pictures didn’t represent what he thought they represented. This was enough to make the narrator give up on art, when he could have been “magnificent” if only he’d stuck with it.
Quote 35
When a mystery is too overpowering, one dare not disobey. Absurd as it might seem to me, a thousand miles from any human habitation and in danger of death, I took out of my pocket a sheet of paper and my fountain-pen. But then I remembered how my studies had been concentrated on geography, history, arithmetic and grammar, and I told the little chap (a little crossly, too) that I did not know how to draw. (2.12)
The narrator is ready to give up on drawing before he even starts, practically. As a grown-up himself, not having had enough of the proper encouragement when he was young, he left behind his creative instinct and imaginative style.
Now it would be a lot harder for him to make something like his Drawing Number One than it was before. For example, he can barely draw a correct sheep and ends up drawing a box instead. But, because the prince is so persuasive and has such a strong personality, this new friend persuades the narrator to keep trying to draw anyway.
Quote 36
Perhaps you will ask me, “Why there are no other drawings in this book as magnificent and impressive as this drawing of the baobabs?”
The reply is simple. I have tried. But with the others I have not been successful. When I made the drawing of the baobabs I was carried beyond myself by the inspiring force of urgent necessity. (5.20-1)
In this passage the narrator explains just how much he has kept on going. He “ha[s] tried” again and again to make all his drawings “magnificent and impressive,” but the one that has the most of these characteristics is the drawing of the baobabs. The reason the narrator thinks this drawing is more snazzy than the others is because of the subject. The baobabs themselves are so significant that the drawing reflects their significance.
Quote 37
…I am not at all sure of success. One drawing goes along all right, and another has no resemblance to its subject. I make some errors, too, in the little prince’s height: in one place he is too tall and in another too short. And I feel some doubts about the colour of his costume. So I fumble along as best I can, now good, now bad, and I hope generally fair-to-middling. (4.14)
Even when he’s not satisfied with his work, the narrator has to keep going. He explains that some pictures are better than others, and sometimes he does a better job of recording the details than others, without being exactly sure of why that is. The most important thing, though, is telling his story and conveying the essence of the little prince to his readers. In order to do this, the narrator simply has to keep drawing.
Quote 38
“Oh, no!” I cried. “No, no, no! I don’t believe anything. I answered you with the first thing that came into my head. Don’t you see—I am very busy with matters of consequence!” (7.16)
Here, the narrator is focusing on the wrong thing. He’s been working so hard to fix his plane (and we admit, that sounds pretty important) that he misses out on something else that’s just as important, only in a different way.
And that’s his conversation with the prince. The narrator doesn’t pay attention to what the prince is saying because he is preoccupied with his plane—but to the prince, his worries are way more important than what the narrator sees as “matters of consequence.” Of course, that’s like grown-up speak and is one thing that the narrator usually tries to avoid.
Quote 39
“This is only his box. The sheep you asked for is inside.”
I was very surprised to see a light break over the face of my young judge: “That is exactly the way I wanted it! Do you think that this sheep will have to have a great deal of grass?” (2.27-8)
There are two kinds of transformations taking place in this scene. We need some twinkly lights or explode-y sounds. First, the narrator makes a drawing that changes a box into a sheep. Poof! Second, the prince’s face is transformed by his knowledge of that drawing. Swoosh! And the narrator is transformed because he realizes that the friend he’s been searching for all his life is in front of him. Ka-POW!