Book review of The Little Prince
The Little Prince is a tale for both children and adults. The Little Prince is the story of a man who crashes his airplane into the desert only to meet a traveling boy from a small planet. The boy inquires about trees and sheep, shares his journeys and various encounters, and then leaves. Yet, reading between the lines, the story offers a much more complex, eiching, satisfying and eye-opening moral: what matters in life is love - and caring about someone or something and maintaining that relationship. The prince loves his rose enough to care for it every night by protecting it with a glass globe and requesting a muzzle for his sheep. He knows that the rose is naive with only four purposeless thorns and, out of his loyalty to her, it is his duty to protect her. Likewise, the narrator loves the prince and feels an obligation to secure his safe journey home.
I read this book as a child and was infected with a sense of awe and a newfound respect for the written word and its power to touch, heal and change perception. For myself, it accomplished two things; it instilled in me a desire to one day
become a writer and touch others with my words and like the narrator of the story, and Antoine De Saint-Exupery (whose own plane crash is said to have been the basis for the tale) it instilled within me a hope that one day the Little Prince will return and someone will let me know.
What is the meaning of this tale? Easily saying is that the tale talk about many normal things like morals and principles and values from two different but successive way as children and adults. As the narrator said you can only catch adults’ attention by describing the price of something or saying the number of something. It’s hard to make adults feel lovely by the children’s beautiful describing. That is the reason why many adults believe this tale is a tale for adults.
Being insincere and utilitarian, adults consider useful and kids think sinful. Free spirit and free heart, adults consider absurd and children believe necessary. The amazing point is that these two different beliefs are held by one species--Human. When we were young, we could see anything God want us to see. But after decades, what we could see was only something we need to see.
There are so many good things for children and their imagination. And there are not so many things for adults and their reality.