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Summary of The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery
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The book starts with the narrator, who is an airplane
pilot, recollecting his favorite picture when he was a six-year-old boy. The
picture was of a boa constrictor eating a large animal. He recalls how a boa
constrictor cannot move after swallowing its prey, and must hibernate
for the six months until its food has been digested. Fascinated by this story,
he had drawn his first drawing, Drawing Number One, which showed a boa
constrictor devouring an elephant. When he showed his picture to the elders he
was surprised to see that they couldn't make out what it was and were not
frightened of it either as he had hoped they would be. They couldn't
understand why anyone would be frightened of a hat, which is what they
interpreted the drawing to be. But his picture was not a hat but rather, a boa
constrictor digesting an elephant.
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He then drew the inside of the boa constrictor in another
picture, Drawing Number Two, where the elephant could be seen clearly.
But the grown-ups advised the narrator to give up drawing and pursue
geography, arithmetic and grammar. Disheartened by his failure to become a painter,
he realizes how difficult it is for children to always be explaining
something to grown-ups. So the narrator learned to be a pilot, noting that the
geography he learned did prove to be useful but that his opinion of adults did
not improve: whenever one would see Drawing Number One, they would think
it was a hat. Consequently, he could no longer talk about boa
constrictors or stars with anybody.
This continued until six years earlier when his plane had
crashed in the Sahara desert. He was thousand miles from home and faced
with a life or death situation. The narrator was shocked to hear an odd
little voice asking him to draw a sheep. He turns to see the little prince, who
is examining the narrator, looking nothing like a child lost in the middle
of the desert. The narrator doesn't know how to draw a sheep so he shows
Drawing Number One to the little prince instead. The little prince examines the
drawing and says that he doesn't want a picture of an elephant inside a boa
constrictor. Finally after a couple of attempts he is able to draw a box
with a sheep inside it, and the little prince is very happy.
The narrator and the little prince become friends
and he
tries to find out where the little prince comes from, but the little prince
is more concerned with the pilot's plane, laughing at its broken parts. The
little prince is comforted by the fact that the narrator also comes from the
sky, asking him what planet he comes from. The pilot is surprised at this
question and in turn tries to find out what planet the little prince comes
from. The little prince ignores the question and admires the pilot's drawing
of the sheep in a box. The pilot offers to draw a string to tie to the
sheep so he won't get lost, but the little prince laughs. The sheep will not get
lost he says, because on the planet where he lives everything is very
small.
The narrator is surprised to discover that the planet the
little prince comes from is very small and only the size of a house. In
fact, it is an Asteroid called B-612, which is only visible through a
telescope. The narrator claims that a Turkish astronomer had sighted the
little prince's asteroid in 1909, but that no one would seriously believe
anybody wearing traditional Turkish clothes. After a Turkish dictator
ordered all his subjects to change to European clothing, the astronomer
successfully presented his report again in 1920.
The narrator insists that these details are not a
concession to his grown-up readers. He says that grown-ups can only understand facts
and figures, without ever wondering about other essential qualities,
such as beauty and love. Instead they only care about how old someone is or
how much a house costs in order to decide what is beautiful. For example, he
notes that a child would accept the little prince's existence based
solely on the fact that he wanted a sheep, while an adult would care only that
the little prince came from Asteroid B-612.
Click here for
part 2 of the summary of The Little Prince |
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