Student Question
What are the advantages of Saint-Exupery's point of view in The Little Prince?
Quick answer:
Saint-Exupéry's use of first-person point of view in The Little Prince offers two main advantages. Firstly, it invites readers to question the narrator's reliability, as the story unfolds solely through the pilot's perspective, potentially suggesting subjective interpretations like the little prince being a mirage. Secondly, it highlights the pilot's personal journey of self-discovery and spiritual enlightenment, paralleling the little prince's own realizations, thus enriching the narrative's thematic depth.
The Little Prince is written in the first person point of
view. This point of view is distinguished from the other types in that
we distinctly see the word "I" appear in the narrative. In other words, we see
all of the action of the story from the narrator's
perspective, who is also an active participant in the story. In a
sense, the reader becomes one with the narrator. In The Little Prince,
it is the pilot who has crash landed in the desert who is the
narrator.
One advantage to a first person point of view is that the
reader is given the opportunity to doubt the truthfulness of the narrator's account. Since the whole story is told solely from the narrator's perspective, and everyone can be guilty of having a flawed perspective, the reader sees that what the narrator is saying may not quite...
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be complete objective truth. For example, it is questionable as to whether or not the narrator actually encountered the little prince in the desert. After all, the pilot has just crash-landed in the Sahara Desert with barely enough drinking water to last a week. It is possible, and it has been widely speculated by literary critics, that the little prince the pilot conversed with is actually just a mirage.
The second advantage is that the first person point of view
makes it very clear that this is a story of self-discovery for the
pilot and not just for the little prince. As the pilot gets to know
the prince and learn about all the things he has experienced and learned, the
pilot has his own self-awakening. One of the story's central
themes is spiritual enlightenment. The little prince gains spiritual
enlightenment by realizing that it is the spiritual things that matter most,
such as his love for his rose, rather than the physical things. Likewise, the
pilot who was discouraged at a young age from developing his imagination,
creativity, and pursuing his dreams also learns from the prince that he is
right to reject the self-centered materialism of this world and to believe that
there is a higher truth and the possibility of reaching "true understanding"
(Ch. 1). The pilot was able to feel a kinship with the little prince that he
was never able to feel before due to his own way of seeing the world. In fact,
we learn in the second chapter that the pilot lived his life alone, "without
anyone that [he] could really talk to," until the prince appeared in the Sahara
(Ch. 2). Therefore, we see that the book is written in the first person in
order to show us the narrator's revelations as well as the
prince's.