The Little Prince
Antoin de Saint-Exupery's most famous work, The Little Prince, makes a number of claims regarding the often perplex relationship between adults and children. In the story, adults seem incapable of grasping the truth without having it explained to them by patient children, and this theme is repeated in multiple contexts. By examining the narrator's first experience with adults, the little Prince's home, and the Prince's time on earth, one is able to see how fully adults miss the beauty and in-depth wonder of the world around them, with the subtle implication that adults will only grasp the truth of the novella itself if they adopt the same kind of curious nature seen in children.
At the beginning of the novella, the narrator describes the experience of drawing a boa constrictor digesting an elephant even as adults believe it to be an image of hat (Saint-Exupery 2). This experience leads the narrator to state what may be the novella's central claim regarding the relationship between children and adults; namely, that grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is exhausting for children to have to provide explanations over and over (Saint-Exupery 2). The narrator generally dislikes adults, or at least their ideological and imaginative restrictions, and uses his picture of a boa eating an elephant in order to test adult's perception of the world, which is always revealed to suffer from the self-imposed seriousness of adulthood, a seriousness that precludes one from truly appreciating the beauty in the world.
The prince offers the ideal counterpoint to adults, because he immediately recognizes the boa as a boa, to the point that he is able to exclaim No! No! I don't want an elephant inside a boa constrictor (Saint-Exupery 6). The narrator and the prince form a bond quickly, and the narrator soon discovers the prince lives on an asteroid, which provides yet another opportunity to highlight the perceptual limitations of adults. The narrator relates how a Turkish astronomer who had identified an asteroid made a formal demonstration of his discovery at an International Astronomical Congress [.] but no one had believed him on account of the way he was dressed (Saint-Exupery 9). However, a little over a decade later, the astronomer repeated his demonstration [] wearing a very elegant suit [] and this time everyone believed him (Saint-Exupery 10). The adults are unable to see the validity of the astronomers discovery because they are too focused on making meaning out of the irrelevant details of his appearance, and this incident serves to further highlight the novella's main claim that adults and children experience the world in fundamentally different ways as a result of adulthood's imaginative restrictions which preclude understanding and acceptance of new or otherwise surprising information.
The prince's time on Earth is similarly useful for pointing out adulthood's abandonment of wonder in lieu of a self-imposed seriousness, and in particular when he meets the railway switchman who notes that no one is ever satisfied where he is (Saint-Exupery 65). Children are the only ones who look out the train window, because adults are so concerned with getting somewhere new that they fail to enjoy the journey itself. One may consider the experience of reading a book the same way, as many adults likely have been trained to read quickly, searching for the relevant plot points without considering the qualities of a book's particular language or illustrations. In the same way that adult's preoccupations with standards of appearance cause them to ignore an exciting discovery, so too does a learned preoccupation with the elements of a story deemed important cause one to miss the depth and humor in a presumably silly little story about a Prince who lives on an asteroid.
The novella seems to suggest that the adult reading The Little Prince will ultimately fail to recognize the beauty of the story by focusing only on the ending, which is admittedly somewhat melancholic. A child, on the other hand, will be able to enjoy and celebrate the Prince's adventure of discovery in spite of the fact that the story eventually ends on a sad note. This is important to note because the novella is actually quite funny, but if one is only interested in determining the facts of the narrative, such as nature (and number) of the Prince's home, the humor dissolves, leaving the adult unsatisfied and ultimately reinforcing the misleading standards and mental restrictions that adults impose on themselves in the name of seriousness and responsibility. Of course, this dissatisfaction is the adult's fault, and as such leads adults to be the subject of much of the novella's criticisms and complaints regarding the functioning of human society and interaction.
The Little Prince is not shy in its disapproval of an adult mindset which serves to preclude the experience of beauty and humor, and it repeatedly criticizes adults safe in the knowledge that adults will be unable to fully appreciate this criticism unless they are able to adopt a more open, childlike perspective in the first place. Children are not only shown to be more inquisitive than adults, but they also are portrayed as asking the right kinds of questions, because the questions children ask are ultimately more fundamental and curious than the questions adults ask, because adult questions are mediated by the imaginative filter of adulthood. Thus, even when adults attempt to inquire about the world or other people, they may only do so in the most ordinary way by asking questions that ultimately do nothing to contribute to the sense of wonder borne out of an open mind.
As a result of this ideological inflexibility, an exotic picture of a boa eating an elephant is reduced to a hat, an exciting discovery is ignored as a result of cultural biases, and even an adult's reading of the novella itself is shown to be mournfully lacking. This is not to suggest that all adults will be incapable of appreciating the novella in the same way as a child, but rather that in order to do so, adults must adopt the unbiased and altogether unrestricted perspective of a child exploring the world.
Work Cited
De Saint-Exupery, Antoine. The Little Prince. New York: Harcourt, 1943.
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