In 1943, the work of interest to us was first published. We will briefly talk about the background of its creation, and then conduct an analysis. "The Little Prince" is a work whose impetus for writing was one case that occurred with its author.
In 1935, Antoine de Saint-Exupery was in a plane crash while flying in the direction Paris-Saigon. He ended up in the Libyan Desert, located in the Sahara, in its northeastern part. Recollections of this accident and the invasion of the Nazis prompted the author to think about the responsibility for the Earth of people, about the fate of the world. In 1942, he wrote in a diary that he was worried about his generation, devoid of spiritual content. People lead a herd existence. To return to a person spiritual concerns, a moral essence - the task that the writer set himself.
Who is the work dedicated to?
The story we are interested in is dedicated to Leon Vert, a friend of Antoine. This is important to note when conducting the analysis. "The Little Prince" is a story in which everything is filled with deep meaning, including dedication. After all, Leon Werth is a Jewish writer, journalist, and critic who suffered persecution during the war. Such a dedication was not just a tribute to friendship, but also a bold challenge of the writer to anti-Semitism and Nazism. In difficult times, he created his own fairy tale Exupery. Against violence, he fought with words and illustrations, which he manually created for his work.
Two worlds in a story
Two worlds are presented in this story - adults and children, as our analysis shows. "The Little Prince" is a work in which the division is made not by age. For example, the pilot is an adult, but he managed to save a child's soul. The author divides people into ideals and ideas. For adults, the most important are their own affairs, ambition, wealth, and power. And the children's soul craves another - friendship, mutual understanding, beauty, joy. The antithesis (children and adults) helps to uncover the main conflict of the work - the confrontation of two different value systems: real and false, spiritual and material. She deepens further. Leaving the planet, the little prince on his way meets "strange adults", whom he cannot understand.
Travel and dialogue
The composition is based on travel and dialogue. The general picture of the existence of a man who is losing moral values ​​is recreated by a meeting with the "adults" of the little prince.
The main character travels in a story from an asteroid to an asteroid. He visits, first of all, the closest, on which people live alone. Each asteroid has a number, like apartments of a modern multi-storey building. In these figures, there is an allusion to the separation of people who live in neighboring apartments, and live as if on different planets. For the little prince, meeting the inhabitants of these asteroids becomes a lesson in loneliness.
Meeting with the king
The king lived on one of the asteroids, who looked at the whole world, like other kings, very simplistically. For him, subjects are all people. However, the king was tormented by this question: "Who is to blame for the fact that his orders are impossible?" The king taught the prince that it is more difficult to judge himself than others. Having learned this, you can become truly wise. The power lover loves power, not his subjects, and therefore is deprived of the latter.
Prince visits the ambitious planet
An ambitious man lived on another planet. But conceited people are deaf to everything except praise. Only fame loves the ambitious, and not the public, and therefore remains without the latter.
Planet Drunkards
We continue the analysis. The little prince gets to the third planet. His next meeting was with a drunkard, who was concentrating on himself and, as a result, became completely confused. This man is ashamed of what he drinks. However, he drinks in order to forget about conscience.
Business man
The fourth planet belonged to the businessman. As the analysis of the fairy tale "The Little Prince" shows, the purpose of his life was that you should find something that does not have a master, and appropriate it. A business man considers wealth that is not his: one who only saves for himself could just as well count the stars. The little prince cannot understand the logic by which adults live. He concludes that its flower and volcanoes are useful that he owns them. But the stars do not benefit from such possession.
Lamplighter
And only on the fifth planet does the main character find a person with whom he wants to make friends. This is a lantern, whom everyone would despise, because he thinks not only about himself. However, his planet is tiny. There is no place for two here. The lamplighter works in vain, because he doesn’t know for whom.
Meeting with a geographer
The geographer, who writes thick books, lived on the sixth planet, which he created in his novel Exupery ("The Little Prince"). An analysis of the work would be incomplete if we had not said a few words about him. He is a scientist, and beauty is ephemeral for him. No one needs scientific work. Without love for a person, it turns out that everything is meaningless - and honor, and power, and labor, and science, and conscience, and capital. The little prince also leaves this planet. Analysis of the work continues with a description of our planet.
Little Prince on Earth
The last place the prince visited is the strange Earth. When he arrives here, the title character of Exupery's Little Prince feels even more lonely. The analysis of the work in its description should be more detailed than in the description of other planets. After all, the author pays special attention in the story to the Earth. He notes that this planet is not at all home, it is "salty", "all in needles" and "completely dry." It’s uncomfortable to live on it. Her definition is given through images that seemed strange to the little prince. The boy notes that this planet is not simple. It is ruled by 111 kings, there are 7 thousand geographers, 900 thousand businessmen, 7.5 million drunks, 311 million ambitious people.
The protagonist's journeys in the following sections continue. He meets, in particular, the switchman guiding the train, but people do not know where they are going. Then the boy sees a merchant who sells pills for thirst.
Among the people living here, the little prince feels lonely. Analyzing life on Earth, he notes that there are so many people on it that they cannot feel themselves as one. Millions remain alien to each other. What do they live for? A lot of people rush in fast trains - why? Neither pills nor fast trains connect people. And the planet without this will not become a home.
Friendship with the Fox
After analyzing Exupery's “Little Prince”, we found out that the boy is bored on Earth. And the Fox, another hero of the work, has a boring life. Both of them are looking for a friend. The fox knows how to find him: you need to tame someone, that is, create a bond. And the main character understands that there are no stores where you can buy a friend.
The author describes the life before the meeting with the boy that Fox led from the story "The Little Prince". An analysis of the work allows us to note that before this meeting he only fought for his existence: he hunted chickens, and hunters hunted him. The fox, having tamed himself, escaped from the circle of defense and attack, fear and hunger. To this hero the formula "vigilantly only the heart" belongs. Love can be transferred to many other things. Having made friends with the main character, Fox will fall in love with everything else in the world. The close in his mind connects with the distant.
Desert pilot
It is easy to imagine a planet home in habitable places. However, in order to understand what a house is, you must be in the desert. Exupery’s analysis of The Little Prince leads to this very idea. In the desert, the main character met with a pilot, with whom he then made friends. The pilot, not only because of the malfunction of the aircraft, was here. He was bewitched by the desert all his life. The name of this desert is loneliness. The pilot understands an important secret: in life there is a sense when there is someone to die for. The desert is a place in which a person has a thirst for communication, thinks about the meaning of existence. It recalls that the home of man is Earth.
What did the author want to tell us?
The author wants to say that people forgot one simple truth: they are responsible for their planet, as well as for those who have tamed. If we all understood this, there would probably be no wars and economic problems. But people are very often blind, do not listen to their own heart, leave their home, looking for happiness far from their relatives and friends. Antoine de Saint-Exupery was by no means for fun writing his fairy tale "The Little Prince". The analysis of the work carried out in this article, we hope, convinced you of this. The writer addresses all of us, urging us to carefully look at those around us. After all, these are our friends. They must be protected, according to Antoine de Saint-Exupery ("The Little Prince"). The analysis of the work will end here. We invite readers to ponder this story on their own and continue to analyze their own observations.