The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Published 1943 · 96 pages · 17,351 words · about 1 hour at an average pace · Children's Literature, Fantasy, Literary Fiction, Philosophy

How hard is The Little Prince to read?

The Little Prince scores 35 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 18 out of 100
Simple, childlike vocabulary. The simplicity is deliberate and precise.
Sentence structure: 18 out of 100
Abstraction: 45 out of 100
Philosophical fable. Abstract concepts delivered through allegory and parable.
Information density: 45 out of 100
Compressed aphoristic wisdom. Every encounter carries thematic weight.
Narrative indirection: 30 out of 100
Nested stories within the frame. The ending is deliberately ambiguous.
Symbolic density: 65 out of 100
The rose, the fox, the stars, the desert—everything is symbolic.
Ironic distance: 30 out of 100
Gentle satire of adult behavior. The child's perspective creates ironic clarity.
Resolution withholding: 40 out of 100
The prince's fate is left ambiguous. Did he die or return home?
Structural complexity: 20 out of 100
Frame narrative with episodic planetary visits. Simple and clean.

How The Little Prince is regarded

The Little Prince holds a literary regard score of 76 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where The Little Prince sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (30 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, The Little Prince scores 28 out of 100. A second mythos, tragedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.25. About the map of stories.

Mode: Romance
But I know that he did go back to his planet, because I did not find his body at daybreak.
Symbol: Mythical (archetypal)
In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing.
Mythos: Romance iii (romance iii)
You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose . . .
Genre: Romance + Anatomy
One can count, there, 111 kings (not forgetting, to be sure, the Negro kings among them), 7000 geographers, 900,000 businessmen, 7,500,000 tipplers, 311,000,000 conceited men

Where the story of The Little Prince takes place

  • Sahara crash site, pilot's six-year-old memory, c. 1930s-40s (1930 to 1943), the main setting
  • Asteroid B-612 and the asteroids 325-330

6 things that are true of The Little Prince, with the passage for each

  1. The Turkish astronomer who discovered Asteroid B-612 is first disbelieved because of his costume, then believed in 1920 in European dress.

    But he was in Turkish costume, and so nobody would believe what he said.

  2. The prince says he once watched the sunset forty-four times in a single day.

    "One day," you said to me, "I saw the sunset forty-four times!"

  3. The businessman has counted exactly 501,622,731 stars.

    Five-hundred-and-one million, six-hundred-twenty-two thousand, seven-hundred-thirty-one.

  4. The lamplighter's planet turns once a minute, so he lights and extinguishes his lamp every minute.

    Then--the planet now makes a complete turn every minute, and I no longer have a single second for repose.

  5. The prince finds five thousand roses in one garden, each like his own.

    And here were five thousand of them, all alike, in one single garden!

  6. The narrator admits he forgot to draw the leather strap on the muzzle he made for the sheep.

    when I drew the muzzle for the little prince, I forgot to add the leather strap to it.

Scenes in The Little Prince that Frye would name

38 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Anagnorisis, untitled
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye. The fox's secret is the recognition that reinterprets the prince's whole relation to his rose.
Pathos, untitled
There was nothing but a flash of yellow close to his ankle. He remained motionless for an instant. He did not cry out. He fell as gently as a tree falls. This is the sacrificial death, the book's pathos.
Alazon, untitled
"Over everything," said the king, with magnificent simplicity. The king, absolute over an empty planet, is an alazon of pretended power.
Alazon, untitled
To admire means that you regard me as the handsomest, the best-dressed, the richest, and the most intelligent man on this planet. The conceited man is an alazon of vanity.
Anatomy, untitled
7000 geographers, 900,000 businessmen, 7,500,000 tipplers, 311,000,000 conceited men A mock-statistical catalogue of the Earth's grown-ups, in the encyclopedic manner of Menippean satire.
Alazon, untitled
Nothing. I own them. The businessman is an alazon who claims to own the stars but cannot use them.

Books that share these scenes with The Little Prince

About the author

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry