Discussion Topic
Conflicts in The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Summary:
In The Little Prince, major conflicts include the Little Prince's struggle to understand adult behavior and his journey to discover the meaning of love and relationships. These internal and external conflicts drive the narrative and highlight themes of innocence, exploration, and the essence of human connections.
What are some conflicts in The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery?
Some of the conflicts in The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery arise because the Little Prince has left his planet in search of answers about how to view the world and relationships. He feels that his rose, his love, has rejected him with her off-putting behavior. However, because he is not on his tiny planet, he has also left his rose alone. Now, he is stranded on earth and worried about how his rose will fare all by herself. She is fragile and defenseless. An overarching conflict is his need to return to her.
The conflict that initially spurs the Little Prince to leave his planet is that he wants answers to fundamental questions about love and relationships. He visits other planets and meets a variety of animals. He also meets the pilot. He asks age-old questions so that he can understand why people (or roses) interact with loved...
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ones the way they do. Essentially, he would like someone to explain love to him and also explain why one loses one’s sense of wonder and innocence as one ages. He does not understand why adults do not see the picture of the serpent for what it is and only see a hat. The author is telling us that the loss of innocence is sad and that adults could learn a lot from the Little Prince.
Conflict is defined as a struggle or clash between two entities in a story, typically between the story's protagonist and antagonist. Since conflict refers to a struggle between two things, we can easily identify a specific conflict in a story as something vs. something else. Conflicts can be both external and internal. Common external conflicts are character vs. character, character vs. society, and character vs. nature. An internal conflict is commonly described as character vs. self. Many different conflicts, both external and internal, can certainly be found in Antoine de Saint-Exupery's novella The Little Prince.
One conflict can be seen with respect to the reasons
behind the Little Prince's decision to leave his planet. On his
planet, he met and started tending a rose he loved very dearly. Yet, due to her
vanity and pride, he felt that nothing he could do for her was good enough; he
felt that she did not love him as he loved her and made up his mind to
leave though it broke his heart to do so. However, before he left, she
confessed her love for him and begged his forgiveness. Since it was the
flower's vanity that drove him from his own planet, we can call this conflict
character vs. character.
Through his travels, the Little Prince experiences personal
growth. As part of his personal growth, he battles with his feelings
for his flower. At one point, he sees a garden of roses, and his prior belief
that his flower was "unique in all the world" is temporarily shattered. It is
the fox that convinces him his flower is unique in comparison to all other
roses simply by virtue of the fact that he loved her. As he continues his
journey, he upbraids himself for having left. All of these
conflicting and changing emotions within the prince are
examples of an internal conflict that we can call
character vs. self.
Even the pilot struggles with his own inner desires and
thoughts as he struggles to survive in nature and escape death; all of these
struggles are also examples of both internal and external conflicts.
What is the conflict in The Little Prince?
In The Little Prince, the problem involves the little prince and his mysterious rose. The rose sprouts suddenly and becomes a new adornment to the little prince's world. He has never seen a living thing quite like her. As a result, he feels that she is special and unique to him. However, when he discovers the rose lies to him, he soon grows sad and feels alone because he believes he can not trust his faithful rose anymore. This growing gloom causes him to venture to other worlds and leave the rose behind.
The little prince then lands on Earth and soon discovers more roses in a garden. He is happy but then grows sad at the thought that his rose is not the only one rose that exists. A fox then teaches the little prince the meaning of love. It is with this new insight that the little prince realizes that his love makes his rose special and that he is responsible for her well-being. His new thoughts focus on returning to his beloved rose so he tries to figure out a way to make this happen.
Several problems exist in The Little Prince. The little prince needs to find an answer to his loneliness (which he does through meeting the rose and other characters). Then, the little prince also must find a way to cope with the faults of others while on his quest for ending loneliness. Finally, the little prince must find a way to get back to what his rose once he knows the meaning of love.