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Contrasts between children and adults in The Little Prince

Summary:

The Little Prince contrasts children and adults by highlighting the imaginative, curious nature of children against the rigid, practical mindset of adults. Children are depicted as open-minded and capable of seeing the true essence of things, while adults are often preoccupied with superficial matters like numbers and status. This contrast underscores the theme of retaining childlike wonder and understanding life's deeper meanings.

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What differentiates adults from children in The Little Prince?

Childhood is presented in The Little Prince as a formative period in one's life in which an imaginative connection to the world is forged. In due course, however, as children get older and turn into adults, that connection is severed. Adults come to see the world in utilitarian terms, as purely a means to an end. Thus they lose all sense of the world's innate value. Not only that, but they become less than fully human. Take the red-faced man that the little prince meets on a distant planet, for example. He spends all day doing nothing but adding up figures. He's never taken time off to smell the roses, literally or figuratively. He thinks he's doing important work, but in actuality he's nothing more than a mushroom.

But this is not a permanent condition, by any means, as the little prince shows the pilot. It is possible, under the...

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right circumstances, to recapture that original sense of wonder that we all had as children but subsequently lost in the transition to adulthood.

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The difference between children and adults in The Little Prince is the growth from irrational and whimsical thinking to rational and analytical thinking.  Modern society constantly grows and sets new standards because of the the thinking of adults.  They are always seeking quantitative results and are asking too few questions.  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry writes a succinct real-world example of the contrast in thinking:

The Little Prince

If you were to say to the grown-ups: "I saw a beautiful house made of rosy brick, with geraniums in the windows and doves on the roof," they would not be able to get any idea of that house at all. You would have to say to them: "I saw a house that cost $20,000." Then they would exclaim: "Oh, what a pretty house that is!"

Grown-ups can often overlook the qualitative beauty in front of them for value and numbers. This is where the importance of a child's mind comes in.  Children help adults realize there is a different (and quite opposite) perspective of the world that can help them see the true worth of life.

Also, adults are attracted to the money, while children are less so.

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What is interesting about the presentation of adults and children in this excellent story is the way that being an adult is described as a state of mind, and some adults are able to retain their childish perspective and are still open to the forces of imagination and creativity that the majority of adults are not aware of. This is indicated most clearly at the beginning of the tale in Chapter 1, when the narrator draws a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. Note what the adult he shows it to says about it:

But he would always answer, “That’s a hat.” Then I wouldn’t talk about boa constrictors or jungles or stars. I would put myself on his level and talk about bridge and golf and politics and neckties. And my grown-up was glad to know such a reasonable person.

The narrator here describes how he uses the picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant as a kind of indicator as to whether the adult is really an adult and dull and unimaginative, or whether he has retained some of his childlike ability to look with the eyes of imagination. The difference between being an adult and a child is not therefore based on age, but it is based on whether somebody possesses the faculty of imagination or not.

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In The Litttle Prince, adulthood is pitted against childhood, and childhood—or, more precisely, a childlike vision carried into adulthood—is the preferred state. Children, the book argues, have a way of seeing and a purity of vision, that adults, in all their "knowing," have lost.

The superiority of a childlike vision is illustrated as the book opens. The pilot has drawn a lumpy brown picture. When he asks adults what it is, they all tell him it is a hat, because they have lost their childlike purity of imagination. Actually, it is a boa constrictor that has swallowed an elephant, but the adults can no longer see that. When the Little Prince immediately understands what the picture is, the pilot knows he has met a kindred—a childlike—spirit.

Anther childlike quality that the Little Prince possesses is purity of devotion. The Little Prince loves and cares for his difficult rose with a clear and faithful heart, even as he has to leave her when she becomes too difficult.

The Little Prince asks simple questions on his travels through the galaxy that more sophisticated people can't answer. Like a child, he wants to know and understand his universe. Like a child, too, when he finds a being that can tell him a truth, he is open and receptive to hearing. For instance, when he is mourning his realization that his own rose is not unique, the fox counsels him—and he understands—that it doesn't matter that his beloved is a rose but that she is his rose, the one rose he loves.

The story is a plea for adults to become more open and childlike way so as to recapture the insights, wonder, and purity of childhood.

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In The Little Prince, what are three ways the book contrasts children and adults?

In The Little Prince, adults are not always portrayed in the most flattering light, particularly in comparison to children, of whom the Little Prince himself is the ideal.

Adults are more worried about material possession than children. While children can be greedy, adults make having as much money and as many possessions as possible an unhealthy obsession. We see this with the businessman who believes he owns all the stars in the galaxy, counting them obsessively and becoming blind to their beauty as a result. The Little Prince owns only a rose and a small planet, but he is content with that.

Adults and children have different ideas of reality. The adult can only see what is literally there and, as a result, assumes the surface is all there is to life—neckties, politics, and so forth, as the narrator tells us. However, children are more concerned with matters of the heart and emotional truth. The Little Prince is more concerned with the welfare of a single rose than anything else. The simple love he gets from the rose means more to him than his own life—quite literally, since the narrator is more concerned with bodily survival in the desert than his child companion is. This behavior is not mere childish folly—the Little Prince knows that without love, life is meaningless.

Children are more open-minded than adults. Once again, the adult just accepts everything at face value, while a child always pries as to why things are as they are or why adults insist they must be as they are. The child does not accept "just because" as an answer. We see this over and over again in The Little Prince when the prince encounters different adult figures whose obsessions and miseries seem strange and even needless to him. For example, the King is lonely and sad, but his isolation assures him he is the greatest and most important man on his own little world. For the Little Prince, this is bizarre and incomprehensible, but the King cannot see reality any other way.

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