Reflection On The Little Prince By Antoine De Saint-exupéry

I seldom read books – let alone a novel – but Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “The Little Prince” truly is one of the most unforgettable reads I have made.

Everybody knows the tale of a curious and petite prince’s encounter with a confused, adult pilot whose plane, unfortunately, crashes somewhere in the Sahara Desert. When the aviator came to his senses, the first thing that greeted him was a young boy, who impatiently asked him,

“Please, will you draw me a lamb!”

And so, the pilot began venturing in the mind of the young prince through his playful stories of himself and his mysterious origin. The entire narrative was a light-hearted one, yet its moral, and even socio-political implications, cannot be denied.

The author’s completely contrasting depiction of adults and children is what makes the story intriguingly captivating. De Saint-Exupéry highlighted the narrow-mindedness, irrationality, and dreariness of the grown-ups, while he acknowledged the open-mindedness, imaginative, and innocent side of the younger ones. It was as if the whole tale was truly written for the purpose of expressing a child’s image of a common adult, which combats the latter’s vision of the young as bothersome, overly talkative, and a restless nuisance.

It certainly is natural for a child’s thoughts to be filled with endless imagination, curiosity and a sense of adventure, and they and will constantly desire these things to be fulfilled. Eventually, we reach the stage of adolescence, then of adult, and we gradually attain the answers to the questions we ask ourselves when we were just beginning – we began learning information piece by piece like a jigsaw puzzle. However, with these accomplishments of gaining knowledge and understanding more of the world, the unique feeling of excitement and ecstasy whenever you discover something out of curiosity, happen less frequently and become less and less of a significance as we become older – and that is what makes an adult and a child drastically different.

To look at the world through the eyes of a child is a powerful thing. Their open-mindedness and eagerness to explore is what makes them truly special, which, sadly the older ones may later on fail to have. Just like the pilot, all of us were once children, and this childlike perspective that we lose as we grow up is what the world misses and needs. It has become a necessity to be more broad-minded about how we look at and address certain things, and be constantly curious in discovering ways on how we can provide various solutions to the seemingly endless problems we face today, rather than staying on the conventional way of thinking which only revives and perpetuates stigmas on a variety of global issues in which movements and advocates worked hard and swore to defeat. It’s about time we alter strategies in approaching problems, shift our thinking about, and think and view the world like a child. If we cannot do so, maybe actually try listening to them – you might learn a thing or two.