Summary
The novella The Little Prince by the French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is about a pilot who, after crashing in the desert, meets a being from another planet. He does not want to forget his little friend and therefore tells the world about him.
The narrative begins with the pilot mentioning an incident from his childhood. When he was six years old, he drew a boa eating an elephant. He asked the adults what they saw, but they always thought the drawing was a hat.
When the pilot drew the inside view of the boa, the adults scolded him, advising him to occupy himself with more important things than drawing closed and open giant snakes. To this day, the pilot does not have a high opinion of adults.
After crashing in the desert, the pilot hears a voice asking him to draw a sheep and discovers the little prince. The friendly pilot then sketches some sheep, but the little prince is not thrilled with these pictures. So the pilot draws him a box and says the sheep is inside. With that, the little prince is satisfied.
With each day, the pilot learns more about the little prince and his journey. The little prince probably came from a distant asteroid, where he lived together with three volcanoes and a flower. There he spent the day mainly cleaning his volcanoes and tearing out the roots of baobabs that would have blown up the tiny planet if they grew too much.
The prince thinks of the rose on his planet and asks the pilot to draw a muzzle for the sheep to protect the rose. The little prince is upset when the narrator does not take the danger to the rose seriously at first.
The pilot learns of the little prince's special relationship with his rose. As a scion, it had been closely observed by the little prince in order to exclude the possibility that it was a baobab. But after a long period of preparation, it turned out to be a beautiful rose, which would talk to the little prince with superiority and demand a lot from him.
The little prince took great care of his flower. He watered it, protected it from drafts with a screen during the day and from the cold with a glass bell at night. But the rose was not satisfied with this. Only when the little prince decided to leave because the flower made him unhappy with its demanding nature, the rose confessed her love for him and regretted the misunderstandings between them, but unfortunately it was too late, and the prince left.
On his journey, the little prince stopped on several planets and met some strange lonely grown-ups. On the first planet there lived a king who saw the little prince as a subject. The king gave the little prince orders to carry out. On the second planet, the little prince met a conceited man who asked the prince to admire him. The little prince did him this favor, even though he could not understand the meaning. On the third planet he met a tippler who drank to forget that he drank.
On the fourth planet, the prince met a businessman who kept insisting that he is a s...