Student Question
What is Saint-Exupery's purpose in using first-person narration in The Little Prince?
Quick answer:
Saint-Exupery uses first-person narration to emphasize the narrator's personal journey of reconnecting with his child self, which is central to the story's themes of imagination and love. This perspective allows readers to intimately experience the protagonist's thoughts and feelings, highlighting how the Little Prince aids this reconnection. The narrative illustrates how the protagonist's initial imaginative spirit, suppressed by adulthood, is revived through his relationship with the prince, underscoring the importance of seeing with the heart.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince contains two central themes: the importance of finding one's child self and the importance of love. Furthermore, Saint-Exupery shows that real love can only be experienced when one is in tune with one's child self. While the title character grows to understand what love really is and its importance, it's really the narrator, the main protagonist, who comes to reconnect with his child self, and it is the prince who helps him find this reconnection, making the narrator's reconnection with his child self the central story. The reconnection with one's child self is really a personal story. An outsider would not be able to fully understand the story without an internal look at the protagonist's thoughts and feelings. Therefore, since the central story is about the narrator reconnecting with his child self, a story that cannot be seen without a...
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look inside the narrator's heart and mind, it is necessary for the story to be written infirst person.
Saint-Exupery begins to develop the central theme of the
importance of connecting with one's child self in the opening chapter. Children
have strong imaginations that allow them to see with their hearts the things
that can't be seen with the eyes; it is the fox who teaches the prince the
importance of seeing with the heart later in Chapter 21. In the opening
chapter, we see that, when the narrator was a child, he had
the ability to see with his imagination, as evidenced by his drawing of a "boa
constrictor digesting an elephant ... from the outside." Yet, his imagination
and, therefore, child self was crushed by grownups who told
him to "lay aside [his] drawings of boa constrictors, whether from the inside
or the outside, and devote [himself] instead to geography, history, arithmetic
and grammar" (Ch. 1). Yet, he refused to completely let go of his child self
and, even as an adult, occasionally showed his "Drawing Number One" to other
adults he met to test their sensibilities. It was not until he met the little
prince that he met someone as heartfelt and imaginative, as in tune with the
child self, as he was. Through developing his friendship with the little
prince, the narrator is able to reconnect with his child self. The narrator
displays his reconnection with his child self through the
drawing of the sheep in the box he makes for the prince upon request, through
the pictures he draws of the prince and of the prince's story, and through his
love for the prince.