We’re back with another three-act analysis, this time of the French classic, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. This book has been a long-time favorite of mine, and like Animal Farm it has a great deal of allegory and symbolism woven into it, though it is decidedly less pessimistic and has a tone that is both whimsical and melancholy.
Spoiler Alert! As with all three-act analyses, it’s impossible to talk about a book’s structure without giving spoilers. This book in particular has something of a twist at the end, so if you don’t want this analysis to spoil it for you, grab a copy and read the book first. It’s super-short and has lots of illustrations, so it’s a very quick read.
Without further ado, let’s dive into our analysis of The Little Prince.
ACT 1: The book opens with an anecdote where the narrator tells how, as a child, he drew a picture of a boa constrictor eating an elephant. When he showed it to adults, they all seemed to think it was a picture of a hat and they could not see the terrifying truth that it was really an elephant inside a snake. This anecdote is meant to show us the contrast between how adults and children see the world.
Many years later, the narrator’s plane crashes in the desert and he is completely alone, until a little boy—the little prince—appears as if out of nowhere. The boy asks him to draw him a sheep but no matter what the narrator draws, nothing seems to satisfy the boy. Eventually the narrator draws a picture of a box with holes in it and tells the boy that the sheep is inside. The holes are so the sheep can breathe. This is the first moment when the narrator begins to think like a child, rather than an adult.
For the rest of Act 1, the little prince tells the narrator his story. He is from a tiny planet where he lives alone, tending to the plants and trying to prevent baobabs from taking root. (This is why he needs a sheep, so it can eat the weeds and dangerous plants.) As the days pass, the little prince tells the narrator more and more about his planet.
Character: The little prince is the protagonist of this story. He begins seeming very childlike but by the end he shows wisdom beyond his years.
Voice: This book is told through the point of view of a nameless first person narrator. Like the book’s author, the narrator is a pilot, and at the beginning of the story he has a very grown-up mindset. As the story progresses, however, the narrator begins to identify with the little prince and think the way a child would think.
As with The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Little Prince is written in the first person peripheral point of view. This means that the character narrating the story is not the protagonist but a supporting character.
Note also that the voice and tone of the story shifts. At first, we are very much in the voice of the narrator relaying to us what the little prince has told him. As the story develops, however, and we get more entrenched in the story of the little prince’s adventure, the narrator begins to disappear from the picture and we slide into what almost feels like a third person limited point of view. Toward the end of the story, the narrator resumes his more prominent role and we are back in the first person peripheral point of view.
Periodically, the narrator’s voice shifts into the second person, as though he is speaking directly to the little prince (though it is clear that we are in the narrator’s thoughts). While the second person can be hard to sustain for a longer book, these short bursts of this unconventional point of view work well sprinkled throughout the story. In these moments of second person narration, we feel as though we are right there, inside the narrator’s head.
World: There are two primary worlds in this story: the harsh desert where the narrator meets the little prince, and the fanciful world of the asteroids and planets that the little prince visits along his travels. Each planet he comes to has its own quirky inhabitant and these people are meant to represent different facets of society.
Problem: The little prince lives alone and he worries about dangerous plants (like baobabs) taking root and overwhelming his whole planet.
Event: The story begins off with the narrator’s plane crashing in the desert, which is where he meets the little prince.
PIVOT POINT 1: The little prince tells the narrator of the arrival of his flower, whose seed blew to his planet “from no one knew where.” He immediately falls in love with the flower and does everything he can to take good care of her. Yet, she is vain and selfish, and she torments the little prince with her constant requirements. Eventually, he decides to leave his planet.
The morning of his departure, he puts everything in order on his small planet. He cleans out the volcanoes and says goodbye to his flower. She apologizes for her past behavior, but he leaves nonetheless. The external event at this pivot point is first meeting the flower. The internal choice is the little prince’s decision to leave his planet.
ACT 2: The second act has two distinct parts to it, split almost directly down the middle. The first part comprises all the planets the little prince visits before he gets to the Earth, and the second part takes place after he has reached our planet.
SUPPORTING CAST: As he stops at different planets, the little prince meets different men who represent various facets of society. When he meets these characters, the little prince wonders at their odd behaviors and remarks that adults “are certainly very, very odd.” These characters include:
The King: This king sits alone on a tiny planet, barely big enough to hold his throne and extensive robes. He instantly assumes the little prince is a subject because to him “all men are subjects.” He also commands the little prince to do things that he would have done anyway, simply as a way to flaunt his power. For example, when the little prince decides to leave, the king tries to prevent him, but eventually lets him go, calling him an “ambassador.”
The Conceited Man: Just as the king views everyone as a subject, the conceited man thinks of everyone as an admirer. Both the conceited man and the king are alone on their planets, which is ironic because the conceited man has no one there to admire him and the king has no one to rule over. Yet, they both believe they are the best or highest rank on their respective planets.
The Drinker: The next planet houses a man who sits alone, drinking. According to him, he drinks in order to forget that he is ashamed of drinking. As it turns out, drinking to forget is a vicious cycle.
The Businessman: This man sits alone with his ledgers and counts the millions of “little glittering objects” in the sky (i.e., the stars). The businessman insists that he owns everything that he counts and makes a distinction between kings and businessmen—kings do not own, they reign over, whereas businessmen own the things they count. The little prince tells the man that he owns his flower and his volcanoes, and that in owning them he is also of use to them, but the businessman is not of use to the stars he supposedly owns.
The Lamplighter: On this planet stands a man, alone with a single streetlamp that he must light and extinguish over and over again. He does this because it’s what he has been ordered to do. While at first the little prince admires the lamplighter’s industrious calling, thinking it a useful and beautiful profession, he soon begins to realize the futility of the man’s role. He is simply doing as he is told. “Orders are orders,” after all.
The Geographer: This man sits alone on a planet, writing in voluminous books. While the man claims to be a geographer, he does not know where anything is on his planet because he is not himself an explorer. In other words, his job is to catalogue the information related by the explorers, but he does not acquire any of that knowledge for himself.
MIDPOINT: If we look at the exact halfway point in the story, that brings us to the lamplighter planet. This chapter has a somewhat of different quality to it than the other planetary visits. Even the little prince himself says of the lamplighter: ”he is the only one of them all who does not seem to me ridiculous. Perhaps that is because he is thinking of something else besides himself.” He goes so far as to say that the lamplighter is the only man with whom he could have been friends.
This scene with the lamplighter has a different quality to it than scenes on the other planets and we do get some sense of self-reflection in that the little prince is considering the lamplighter’s beautiful occupation. That said, this scene does not really operate as a Temporary Triumph (or a False Failure). Yes, it seems as though the lamplighter is the only person among the planetary visits with whom the little prince can be friends, but the little prince is unable to stay on his planet because it is too small.
A bit later in the story (about 60% of the way through the book), we find a more significant Temporary Triumph when the little prince arrives on earth.
The Earth is not just an ordinary planet! One can count, there, 111 kings… 7,000 geographers, 900,000 businessmen, 7,500,000 tipplers, 311,000,000 conceited men—that is to say, about 2,000,000,000 grown-ups.
To give you an idea of the size of the Earth, I will tell you that before the invention of electricity it was necessary to maintain, over the whole of the six continents, a veritable army of 462,511 lamplighters for the street lamps.
At first, it seems like the little prince has found what he has been looking for, but then he realizes that there are no people anywhere on the planet. His Temporary Triumph quickly dissolves into failure when he realizes that he has reached this significant planet and is still all alone.
ACT 2 (Cont’d): While the little prince meets various people on his planetary visits, when he comes to Earth, his interactions are at first with other creatures of the flora and fauna varieties.
First he meets a snake who tells him he is in a desert, which is why there are no people to be found. This interaction with the snake foreshadows the ending because while the little prince says the snake is “no thicker than a finger” the snake counters that he is “more powerful than the finger of a king.” The snake says it will send anything it touches back to earth, and that if the little prince should feel homesick for his own planet, the snake can help him.
Later, the little prince crosses the desert and meets a solitary flower with only three petals. The flower tells him there are no people because men have no roots and “the wind blows them away.” Eventually, the little prince comes across a garden filled with roses that look just like his flower back on his planet. He is distraught because he had thought his flower was unique and now he has found several just like it. He is overcome with grief and he cries.
PIVOT POINT 2: The second pivot point occurs when the little prince meets the fox. The little prince is very unhappy because he has just left the garden with all the roses and he asks the fox to play with him. The fox says it cannot play with him because it is not tamed. It asks the little prince to tame it and the little prince does.
When the little prince is ready to leave, the fox is very sad and the little prince realizes that in taming something you can both do it good as well as harm. The fox tells the little prince: “Go and look again at the roses. You will understand now that yours is unique in all the world.” When the little prince goes to look at the roses, he realizes that his own rose is, in fact, unique. The little prince tells the roses of the fox: “I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world” and he realizes that the same is true of his rose. His flower is unique because she is his.
The event at this second pivot point is the little prince taming the fox. The choice that he makes stems from realizing that his rose is, in fact, unique and that he is now responsible for those he has tamed—the fox and his rose.
ACT 3: In Act 3, the little prince meets a few other adults: the railroad switchman, the merchant, and eventually our narrator. Like the men the little prince meets on his planetary visits, the railroad switchman and the merchant each seem to have a futile existence.
The railroad switchman simply sends people on their way, going left and right. All the travelers are never satisfied with where they are and they also don’t seem to pursue anything. Instead, they seem to move simply for the sake of moving. Only the children seem to be interested in the journey itself, pressing their faces against the train windows.
The merchant sells pills that quench thirst, and claims the pills will save people fifty-three minutes every week. The little prince says to himself “if I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water.” In other words, the pills the merchant sells don’t seem to have any significant impact or importance.
The third person the little prince meets is the pilot-narrator.
CRISIS: The little prince has told the narrator his story. The narrator has run out of water and goes looking for a well. They find the well and together they both collect some water. The little prince tells the narrator that he needs a muzzle for his sheep because he is responsible for his flower and does not want the sheep to eat the rose. The narrator realizes that the little prince has plans he is not telling him about.
CLIMAX: The little prince tells the narrator that he is going back home, but that it is too far. He says he has the sheep (in the box) and the sheep’s muzzle. The narrator realizes that the little prince is becoming afraid and the little prince says that he is.
The narrator says he wants to hear the little prince laugh again and the little prince says:
All men have the stars… but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travelers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems. For my businessman they were wealth. But all these stars are silent. You—you alone—will have the stars as no one else has them… In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night… You—only you—will have stars that can laugh!
The narrator does not want to leave the little prince alone. The little prince says that it is too far to get home and he cannot carry his body with him. They sit out under the stars and when the little prince stands up, there is a flash of yellow near his angle and he falls to the ground.
Ending Type: This is a Tragic Ending because the little prince starts out wanting to take care of his flower, but after he travels, his planet becomes too far away. Instead, he gets bitten by the snake and it is the only way for him to get back to his rose and his planet.
DENOUEMENT: Six years pass and the narrator still mourns the loss of the little prince. He imagines him back on his home planet, sheltering the flower under a glass globe and tending to his sheep. He worries whether the sheep will have eaten the flower. The narrator says: “no grown-up will ever understand that this is a matter of so much importance!”
CONCLUSION: Before we wrap up this three-act analysis, it’s important to note one thing about the little prince: he never answers any questions himself, but when he has a question he refuses to let go of it. In fact, we have a Rule of 3 where three times, the narrator says of the little prince that he “never in his life had let go of a question once he had asked it.”
The first time the narrator says this is when he is speaking with the little prince about the subject of thorns. The little prince wonders whether the flower’s thorns will be sufficient to protect it from the sheep and prevent the sheep from eating the flower.
The second time this phrase comes up is when the little prince is meeting the businessman and he wants to know what the businessman is counting. While the businessman is focused on owning everything he counts, the little prince later learns that what really matters is forging a connection with something (like his flower) and feeling a sense of responsibility for it.
The third time we hear that statement about how the little prince never lets go of a question, he is speaking to the geographer about the ephemeral nature of his flower. All three instances relate to his flower in some way—truthfully, everything in the story comes back to the flower, because she is the driving force behind the little prince’s motivations.
If we look at the order of the above instances as they appear in the book, it may seem as though the cadence is inverted. But if we consider the events chronologically, the first instance is actually the last one to happen (even though it appears first in the book). That instance is different from the other two because the little prince is actively trying to do something to protect his flower.
In this scene, the narrator responds to the little prince’s question with the first thing that pops into his head and says the thorns will not protect the flower at all. When the little prince pushes back, the narrator says he is busy with “matters of consequence.” The little prince replies:
If someone loves a flower, of which just one single blossom grows in all the millions and millions of stars, it is enough to make him happy just to look at the stars. He can say to himself, ‘Somewhere, my flower is there.. .’ But if the sheep eats the flower, in one moment all his stars will be darkened… And you think that is not important!
This is the moment when we realize just how important the flower is to the little prince. We also understand why the little prince never lets go of a question: because the matters he is asking about are truly of grave importance, even if they may not seem so to a grown-up. In this way, this inverted Rule of 3 underscores not just what the little prince is asking, but why his questions are significant.
Until next time, keep writing and keep being awesome!
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