The Little Prince

SPOILER WARNING! This review reveals the end of the story.

This is one of my favourite books but its popularity puzzles me because I've always felt The Little Prince dealt with the dark side of life, and that it might tempt us with the lure of an easy exit.

This is a tale in which a child commits suicide. Period. It's no good insisting that Saint-Ex's story offers life lessons, or that it is a metaphor for wanting to go home. This might well be true, but it's at bottom still the story of a little boy whose heart is broken by a difficult relationship who chooses to end his suffering by killing himself with a snake bite.

I believe the book is Saint-Ex's suicide note. Saint-Ex considered suicide unmanly and base. Man must fight on and struggle with life no matter how bad it gets. He clearly states this in Wind, Sand, and Stars. Yet Saint-Ex was an unhappy difficult man stuck in difficult relationships with difficult women. Furthermore, as a French thinker he was living through the same period of existential angst that would give rise to Camus and Sartre. (Not to mention World War II! ) He cleverly trapped himself in his own rules. Men don't kill themselves, and Saint-Ex was a Man. He had to find a subtle exit and any suicide note he left had to be disguised.

He died returning from a reconnaissance mission in an unarmed plane. Why unarmed? Why did he insist on being given these excessively dangerous missions? Pure conjecture on my part, but I think he just wanted to end it all, and he wanted to go out a hero.

In this light, I see The Little Prince as his suicide note. A possible reason is ordinary to the point of being trite. A mere failed love affair, a turbulent romance with his wife Consuelo. The deeper reason is that like so many artists, Saint-Ex suffered and could not shake that off. But being the man's man that he was, he had to go out like a man. Not for Saint-Ex the easy exit. Not for Saint-Ex the certain exit. I suppose his plane was unarmed so that he could not go looking for a fight, as a safeguard against his engineering an easily found death. He had to come back safely for his mission to be successful, and yet the risk of being shot down was always there, the German defenses promising to end his suffering like the snake promises to send the Little Prince home to his beloved rose with a single quick bite.

Saint-Ex himself is thus the Little Prince, but not wanting to be obvious, he makes the narrator a pilot, just as he was, so that we mistake the narrator-pilot for the author-pilot. Instead, perhaps we should see the child-prince in the author and see ourselves, the readers, in the narrator. When the Little Prince tells the narrator not to worry, that he would only seem dead but that he would really be up there in the stars, isn't this really Saint-Ex telling us that his spirit, his soul, would be there for us in his books?

Not for children.

Vincent Poirier, Dublin

The touching story that everyone knows. If you haven't read it yet, now is your chance. This particular edition is a most beautiful collector's edition. The perfect gift for the one you love.

"Goodbye," said the fox. "Here is my secret. It's quite simple: One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes."

They say it is the translation that makes this book not very easy to read however I am not sure that is the case. I did discover the story behind the book which now makes the book much more sense. I don't want to give it away but I will tell you this... The Little Prince is a man who isn't happy with his wife (his single rose) and leaves her to discover other relationships (planets). With this in mind the story will make much more sense, I promise.

The Complex and Simple issues of the Human relation in a Book For Children. You Must find it

The Little Prince is ostensibly a children's book with lots of lessons for EVERYONE! Read it again and again and you will find a new nugget of wisdom each time. I adore this book as do my students. You won't be disappointed!!