Katerina: The Little Prince

Title: The Little Prince

Author: Antoine de Saint-Exupèry

Copyright date: 1943

Number of pages: 113

Genre: Children Classics


Saint-Exupery`s story starts with his flight crash in Sahara. While he is a "castaway" ,he meets a little blond boy who he calls a little prince. The kid is innocent and naive but in the same time he`s wise and behaving like an adult in many ways. The narrator asks the little prince to tell him how did he came to the desert, from the middle of nowhere. The boy tells him that he comes from another planet that is million times smaller than the Earth. There he was taking care of a rose - he put it under a glass dome every night because he wanted to be sure that nobody will harm the flower. Although his planet isn`t big there are a few volcanoes that the little prince often used to clean, even the extinct one.
One day he decided to go on a journey, explore the world and visit other planets. During the trip he goes to many other planets - some bigger, some smaller than his own. On most of those places there was only one person, so he didn`t stay a lot. The boy has very different thinking than the people he met such as the king, the conceited man, the tippler, the businessman, the lamplighter and the geographer. He doesn`t understand most of the things that the adults tell him because he`s too young and naive. However, on his final destination - the Earth, he didn`t meet any people at first only a fox. As the time goes by, he tames the fox and makes a good friend for a lifetime. Anyway he is disappointed from the Earth because he sees that there are so many other curious kids like him, and so many roses that are the same as his that he took special care of.
In the end of the book he gets really scared of the snake that he often sees on the Earth. One day he realises that his time has come, and he has to leave everything - his planet, the rose, the fox... He dies gracefully bitten by his enemy the snake or as Exupery wrote "He fell gently as a tree falls. There was not even any sound..."

This book is from the ones that can be read anytime, because at every age you look to it differently and your point of view is never the same.If you read it when you`re a kid you think that it`s just a story about a boy your age but when you grow up a little bit, you see the metaphor that the whole book actually is. It`s an abstractive way to describe the world we live in. I think that every single person could find himself into one of the characters. Whatever you are the little prince, the conceited man or the snake, you can find yourself into people`s eyes and see if you are good or bad person because sometimes it is harder to find out than it seems.