Theme
"When a mystery is too overpowering, one dare not disobey." That is the mystery of The Little Prince, a novel that represents and emphasizes some of the many roles of aspects in life - such as honesty, loneliness, hate, success, love, compassion, fear, regret - and has a strange power to portray them with extreme precision. I have learned so much about life from this richly-themed novel that since reading it, I have been seeing and understanding the world differently.
The first main principle I learned from The Little Prince is simply to see with your heart and imagination rather than with eyes, facts, and figures. With the author's depiction of adults, lonely people who have lost their ability to understand and make their surroundings into beyond what they are on the surface, the little prince and the narrator alike understand this loneliness as inability to perceive beyond. The adults he meets are so lost and alone without even knowing so because they rely only figures to prove something, whereas in the children's world, emotions and 'matters of consequence' are viewed upon with imagination and a relative understanding (something you don't need to see to know that it exists). To be able to think like the children do is a trait much worth seeking, though. When the little prince was about to depart from a fox he met that had wished to be tamed by him, he was left with this: "'And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.'" A fox, that has spent its days observing men and their habits, surely would have derived the morals that govern the people that can se life for more than wealth and status. Unlike the children and people who know what their goals are, the adults depicted are always wistful of other things - money, power, material, and mundane objects.
The second important theme I have learned from The Little Prince is not to let all the new developments and material things our rapidly developing society has to offer take away that which has always been most important in life. When the little prince meets the merchant selling pills, which he claims will quench thirst, saving a calculated fifty-three minutes from every week spent drinking, he asks, "'And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?' 'Anything you like...' 'As for me,' said the little prince 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.'" People in modern society have developed such things that advertising claims to make their lives easier and more efficient. They drink bottled water and eat pre-packaged meals; and they would much rather prefer taking diet pills than exercising off extra pounds. "How old fashioned," most of us would probably reply to the little prince's desire to use those extra minutes to walk to a fresh spring. But this kind of stay-convenient and technologically-dependent attitude of modern society is what may very well lead to a foreshadowed depression (and has already begun its process) - if anything at all.
Yet another important message I wanted to mention that relates to the latter theme is the extreme importance of preserving true friendship in our lives, which is quickly fading. Being a friend will give an unfallible uniqueness and undying quality to life that nothing else can imitate. During a conversation with a fox, the little prince learns that "'Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends anymore...'" As I look around my high school environment, it is as if the most dramatic change has occured. Beauty, wealth, and social status has so vastly superseded the original qualities people once looked for in a friend, such as trust and compassion, that I cannot stress the importance of this theme enough. When the little prince encountered the many thousands of roses, contradictory to what his single beloved rose told him on his planet, he did not give up that love for his rose, even though there were so many that looked like her. He simply told them about his fox friend: "'...He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world.' And the roses were very much embarassed. 'You are beautiful, but you are empty,' he went on. 'One could not die for you...but in herself alone [his rose] she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses...'" Like a field of beautiful women the little prince could easily have given in to, the little prince much preferred his one rose to all the hundreds of them. This kind of friendship and love is so rare to find, because as said earlier, "'...there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship...'" and is one of the few things people have left yet to survive on.