Le Petit Prince

I just pour my head out on here. It's such a mess but it feels good. Right now I should be thinking about my German oral assesment, but I was just thinking....

about interpretations. and understanding. and how for me in my own life, The little prince is a really intresting thing.

I think i first picked it up (I was given it as a present for my birthday (?) by the daughter of some french ambsadorial (sp.) official) when I was seven or eight. And I really enjoyed it. But just beacuse it was pleasant, and the little prince, he was a good guy, and becuase it was kind of magical and fantastical, and becuase of all this kind of thing.

Then I put it down for another I don't know, well, untill 5th form, when I was looking for an easy book to add into my reading log, becuase I was rowing first term, and had hardly any time, but we had a quota to fill. And I remember that time, I had decided it was all about the power and value of innocence and youth. We were reading a book about it at the time on class, and I guess that just shone though. The power of youth, even naivity (sp.), to see through the convoluted, even outright ridiculous adult world, to drive through to more absolute (absolute then I considered only in a positive sense) truths. and it was about what youth and innocence could show adults, even the stranded narrator, who himself declared his life to be not so much attached to any adult company as such.

Anyway I think I held onto that reading for a while following this, reading the book a number of other times over especially, I think, 6th form holidays.

Then I came back to it again thinking about schol. english. and by then I'd kind of grown quite a bit english-wise, and was able to concieve books in all manner of strange or novel or intresting ways. anyway I think it was because I'd done some psycho-analytical stuff for media, and if I didn't strictly attack Le Petit Prince in a Freudian sense, it was Freudian-esque. My reading there considered the whole thing in this way:

A man goes out into the desert. The desert is an isolated, silent place. It removes one from society, and gives one time to think. the stranded narrator has been stuck in this baren and silent desert for a number of days, and then the little prince comes along. Now I then saw the prince as the re-awakening, the re-arrival, of the narrator's subconsious, and of his childhood self (that self discussed in the first few chapters, the child who liked flowers, who could see boa constrictors in drawings of boa constrictors). The prince was a metaphor for this, and the journeying through the planets a re-visitation of experiences of the narrator's childhood. And he had come about because of the setting, the desert where the narrator was totally removed from society. And so, the dialouges between the two were really just an internal dialouge in the narrator's head. And I had so much more besides this, and to support it. For example at the end, or near the end, we have our illustration where the narrator tells us we may find the little prince too, this was the place where he found him. and the thing was, the image is totally non-descript, just two sand dunes and a star, from memory. which adds tothe thesis that anyone may come upon a little prince of thier own, if they head out into some isolated environment where they are removed from society. and it also is like, there is a definte truth, and there are true values in the world, if one just takes the time to sit, and look for them - they will become apparent.

anyway yeah. And now I feel when I think about it, it develops further still. For one I see for example the house in one of the early chapters with flowers and that, as an allusion to Proust (and ah, Proust, he is madly good, and I do want to return to reading him and his giant novel). And I also strart to convieve the prince/the entire story in much more religious/biblical terms. For I beleive it's true that in the bible, a lot of soul-searching was done in the desert, even by Jesus himself. And we have our snake, and we have the little prince, who, like Christ, is a monarch of a heavenly kingdom, is he not? At any rate, he is a prince/king, and he does come from another, higher world. And now I'm begining to concieve the prince as a sort of wandering, naive, passive (perhaps more passive than Jesus was) Christ like figure. In many obvious ways I guess, in his other-worldliness, in his affiliation with the desert, in his ideas about love, his ideas about the confusion/dissilussionment/lack of clarity etc. in society, with his planetary visits, etc., how he likes the old lamp-lighter more than any of the others. and i guess of course the biggest thing is at the end. the little prince dies, but he tells us he's not really going to die. (I'm doing this from memory but, it is something very much like this). He gives himself up to the snake, this metaphor in the bible of worldly evil, which I understand Jesus also gives himself up to (if this is not explicitly the intention, it is the case), but, as with Jesus, it's intentional in the sense that the little prince knows what he's doing, and also knows the ultimate outcome of the action, that he won't actually 'die'. And then there is the return hinted at, by the narrator himself, as discussed earlier. It's not to put forward the idea that The Little Prince is explictly even intended to be a Christ-like figure, but I think there are intresting parallels there, certianly at the very least right at the end, which is something i think i was very aware of actually from even my early readings. But like I said he's more meandering, and he's softer, and more naive.

who knows what I'll think next year. Thinking's always intresting. anyway, german oral assessment. this was a nice short and orderly post.