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Oh Be Careful Little Eyes – A Review of the Little Prince

Oh Be Careful Little Eyes – A Review of the Little Prince

Last updated on: February 23, 2018 at 12:54 pm by Guest Contributor

Oh Be Careful Little Eyes – A Review of the Little Prince 2018-02-23T12:54:28-05:00 Guest Contributor

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Image Credit: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - used in this review in accordance with fair use principles.

Image Credit: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – used in this review in accordance with fair use principles.

Let’s Start With The Book

Childhood in “The Little Prince” is not viewed through the good, the beautiful or the true. “Wait!” I can hear your objections, “The little prince is all about the beauty of his planet and his rose, and seeing that things have value beyond their physical usefulness! How is that not good, beautiful or true?” Well, I am glad you asked!

What the book identifies as “good, beautiful and true” is shown by the juxtaposition of the Little Prince and the various adults he meets along the way. However, the Little Prince suffers from many of the same attitudes that he disdains in the adults. The “goodness” and “beauty” is flat, lacking in joy and true wonder. This makes more sense when you reach the end of the book and realize that the values presented throughout the story are intentionally crafted to make you accept the Prince’s departure. (More on that later.)

The adults in the story are vain, greedy, prideful, busy and too serious. They are also incapable of understanding what is really important in life from the Prince’s point of view.

Yet the Prince is consumed with his own portion of seriousness; like most adults, he judges his serious to be more important than everyone else’s seriousness. The Rose is vain and manipulating; this is excused because she is childish and immature. The fox is seeking to be tamed for his own self-fulfillment, but in his taking what he wants from the relationship, he offers the central value of the book:

“One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.”

It is after this revelation that the Prince finds the Aviator and demands a sheep. He asks endless questions but never answers any in return. His seriousness is the only kind that matters. Anyone who protests is just a silly adult, who understands nothing.

This is all crafted to make the end of the story seem beautiful and right. This is the greatest deception and biggest danger of this book. The reader is subtly, but quite clearly, endeared to suicide through the Prince’s “departure.”

The Prince could have hitched a ride on a flight of migrant birds again, or really, any other magical way of traveling would not have been out of place in this story. But the Author chooses to buy into the gnostic worldview that the Prince’s physical body is only an unimportant shell that is a hindrance to his journey, and that the five hundred million stars will all be like bells pealing with the prince’s laughter when he has gone. The Prince even states, “It will be fun!”

The Prince intentionally considers, plots and follows through with his suicide. Unlike many other vague notions in the book, his suicide is thought through in alarming detail. When the Prince is making his plans with the snake, he seeks assurance that the poison won’t hurt too much and that he won’t suffer. When the Aviator insists on coming with the Prince, the boy is only considers it after he realizes that the snake only has enough poison for one bite. The Aviator witnesses the snake bite the Little Prince and watches him fall to the sand, lifeless. And then the book recovers the illusion that it was only a means of the Prince traveling home, “But I know he did get back to his planet because at daybreak I didn’t find his body. It wasn’t such a heavy body…and at night I love listening to the stars. It’s like five-hundred million little bells…”

The language surrounding his death is all so lovely that it softens the reality that the Prince committed suicide. The description of the stars is a coping mechanism colored by such whimsy that the reader can almost be convinced that the Prince really did make it back to his little planet with his sheep and his rose. This lovely, captivating whimsey is only a cheap imitation of the Good, Beautiful and True. Like the phrase “death with dignity,” it makes any who reject it seem heartless.

You Said This Was A Movie Review.

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