A Review of The Little Prince

The little prince’s planet is tiny—so small that it only needs three chairs, and so small that he can watch the sunset forty-three times a day. He tends to his unique rose with great care, covering her with a glass globe, listening to her complaints, and watching her act coyly. Even though the rose is covered in thorns and occasionally vain and suspicious, the little prince still regards her as his whole world. This pure cherish is a capacity that adults have long been unfamiliar with—we are always calculating values and weighing pros and cons, yet we forget that “what is essential is invisible to the eye.” The adults the little prince meets on his journey are more like a pungent metaphor: the king obsessed with power, the gentleman craving vanity, the merchant driven crazy by numbers, the lamplighter clinging rigidly to rules... Trapped by their own obsessions, they spin around in the cage called “maturity,” forgetting that they were once children who also had the interest to gaze up at the stars. The little prince’s preciousness lies in his constant possession of a pure and clear heart. He worries anxiously about a sheep eating his beloved rose, builds a bond of “taming” with the fox, and understands that “it is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”