The Little Prince Summary: What Happens and What It Means
What The Little Prince is about
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's novella was first published in April 1943, in English and in French, by Reynal & Hitchcock in the United States. Its French publication came later, after liberation, because the Vichy regime had banned Saint-Exupéry's work. He wrote it and illustrated it himself, and the drawings are part of the story rather than decoration.
The narrator is a pilot. His plane crashes in the Sahara, far from anyone, and he has to repair it before his water runs out. While he is stranded there, a small boy appears and asks him to draw a sheep. This is the little prince, and over the following days, while the narrator works on the engine, the boy tells him where he came from.
He came from an asteroid the size of a house, known on Earth as B-612. It has three tiny volcanoes, two active and one dormant, and a problem with baobab seedlings that will overrun the whole surface if they are not pulled out. It also has a rose. The prince loved the rose, sheltered her under a glass globe, watered her and kept the caterpillars off her, and gradually came to feel she was taking advantage of him. So he left, and travelled.
The main characters
The narrator is an adult who has not quite given up being a child. The book opens with his first drawing, made at six years old, of a boa constrictor that has swallowed an elephant. Every grown-up he showed it to said it was a hat and told him to take up something practical. He kept the drawing, and he still shows it to new acquaintances as a test. They always say hat. So he learned to talk to adults about reasonable things only.
The little prince is the first person to look at that drawing and see the elephant. When the narrator fails three times to draw a sheep and in frustration draws a crate instead, saying the sheep is inside, the prince is delighted. He asks questions and never lets them go. He is grave rather than cute.
The rose is vain, demanding and genuinely loved. She exaggerates her ailments and coughs to get attention. When the prince leaves, she apologises for never showing him that she loved him, refuses the glass globe and says she will manage. The prince admits he never worked out how to love her while he was with her.
The six planets
Before Earth, the prince visits six asteroids, each with one adult on it. A king who declares everyone his subject and only gives orders that can be obeyed, such as telling the sun to set at sunset. A conceited man who wants to be admired on a planet where nobody lives. A drinker who drinks to forget that he is ashamed of drinking. A businessman who counts and catalogues the stars in order to own them and never once looks at them. A lamplighter on a planet so small that a day lasts a minute, lighting and extinguishing his lamp every thirty seconds because those are the orders. And a geographer who has never been anywhere, records nothing himself and waits for explorers who never come. He is the one who suggests Earth.
The lamplighter is the only one the prince would have liked to stay with, because that planet has 1,440 sunsets a day and the prince loves sunsets.
The themes
Loneliness, friendship, love and loss sit under a book that looks like a story for children. The six adults are each a complete life reduced to one habit. Ownership, vanity, obedience, record-keeping without experience. Against that, the prince's attention to one rose and one sheep looks like the sane position.
There is a sharper note in the story of the Turkish astronomer who discovered asteroid B-612. His findings were ignored because of his traditional clothing. He gave the same presentation again in a European suit and was believed. Saint-Exupéry is clear about how adults decide what is true.
How the Earth section unfolds (spoilers)
The prince lands in the desert and assumes Earth is uninhabited. He meets a snake, who says he has the power to send the prince home again, should he ever wish it. He meets a flower who tells him the few men she has seen have no roots and are blown about by the wind. He climbs the highest mountain he has ever seen, hoping to see the whole planet and find its people, and sees only emptiness. His own echo answers him and he takes it for a dull person who only repeats what is said. Then he finds a row of rosebushes, thousands of flowers like his own, and is crushed, because he had believed his rose was the only one of her kind.
Why it still matters
It is one of the best-selling books ever published, with an estimated 140 million copies sold, and by November 2024 it had been translated into 600 languages and dialects. Only the Bible has been translated more. It has been adapted for radio, stage, film, television, ballet and opera. Saint-Exupéry, a working aviator, did not live to see its French publication.
It suits readers who want a short book that keeps opening up on rereading, and it works at two levels at once. Children follow the journey. Adults recognise themselves somewhere among the six planets.
