Discussion Topic
The symbolism in The Little Prince and its significance to the pilot
Summary:
The symbolism in The Little Prince is significant to the pilot as it represents themes of innocence, love, and the essence of human relationships. The pilot's interactions with the Little Prince help him reconnect with his own childhood and rediscover the importance of looking beneath the surface to find true meaning in life.
What does the Little Prince symbolize for the pilot?
In order to fully understand what the Little Prince symbolizes for the pilot, it's important to first understand the pilot, including his desires and needs as a character.
At the beginning of the story, before he meets the Little Prince, the pilot describes his own childhood. The pilot is an imaginative child who loves drawing. He draws a creative picture of a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant. However, the adults in the pilot's life fail to understand the drawing. The pilot tells us, "The grown-ups' response, this time, was to advise me to lay aside my drawings of boa constrictors, whether from the inside or the outside, and devote myself instead to geography, history, arithmetic, and grammar. That is why, at the age of six, I gave up what might have been a magnificent career as a painter." This event represents the beginning of the death of the pilot's childhood...
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imagination. The pilot's imagination is slowly crushed and extinguished by adults who think of success in terms of money, ambition, and intellect rather than creativity, freedom, and love.
So, later on when the pilot meets the Little Prince, the Little Prince's natural curiosity and freedom fascinate the pilot. The Prince asks the pilot to draw him a sheep, which causes the pilot to remember his early love for drawing that he has since abandoned. Through stories of his travels and his great love for a rose, the Prince's open mind and sensitivity contrast sharply with the adult characters' hardened, narrow minds. The Prince helps the pilot regain his own childhood curiosity, wonder, and love for the world.
Thus, for the pilot, the Little Prince symbolizes the purity and open-mindedness of childhood: the ways in which children who are still unaffected by adults and adult ideas of success are capable of loving the world with unparalleled freedom.
What is the symbolism in The Little Prince?
The Little Prince can be though of as symbolic on several levels: as a kind of retelling of the story of Christ, or as an environmentalist parable, or as a story about the importance of imagination. Some symbols in this story are more obvious than others, but here's a list of a few of the most prominent symbols.
The Pilot's Drawings
In addition to being tutorials on the nature of artistic representation, the pilot's drawings are symbolic of the imagination.
The Little Prince
The character of the Little Prince is often interpreted as a symbol of Christ; his death by the snake is like a resurrection of sorts. More generally, the Prince is symbolic of a kind of childish wisdom.
The Rose
The rose can be seen as symbolic of desire, or love. The Rose requires care, and her existence seems to depend on the Prince's desire to care for her.
The Snake
The snake has an obvious symbolic parallel in the serpent from the Garden of Eden. In the book, however, the snake is not associated with evil but instead is the thing that enables the Prince to return to his planet.
The Sheep
The Prince's need for a sheep on his planet can be thought of as symbolic of environmental balance. The sheep is also an example of the magic of the imagination, in that it exists only as a drawing of a crate. The perfect sheep cannot be drawn directly.
The baobabs
The baobabs represent a kind of environmental disaster, but also a kind of moral challenge. The Prince must struggle to uproot the baobabs as they appear, since they could destroy his planet.
The Desert
The setting of the story, the desert, suggests the kind of empty landscape that figures in much surrealist art. It symbolically represents a kind of spiritual or imaginative "blank slate" against which the action of the story happens.
The Well
The well represents life, of course, but also faith. The well is found because the Prince is certain it is there.
There are many potential symbols in the book, and no one interpretation of them is more "correct" than any other.