The Little Prince plot
The narrator, an airplane pilot, crashes in the Sahara desert. The crash badly damages his airplane and leaves the narrator with very little food or water. As he is worrying over his predicament, he is approached by the little prince, a very serious little blond boy who asks the narrator to draw him a sheep. The narrator obliges, and the two become friends. The pilot learns that the little prince comes from a small planet that the little prince calls Asteroid 325 but that people on Earth call Asteroid B-612. The little prince took great care of this planet, preventing any bad seeds from growing and making sure it was never overrun by baobab trees. One day, a mysterious rose sprouted on the planet and the little prince fell in love with it. But when he caught the rose in a lie one day, he decided that he could not trust her anymore. He grew lonely and decided to leave. Despite a last-minute reconciliation with the rose, the prince set out to explore other planets and cure his loneliness.
While journeying, the narrator tells us, the little prince passes by neighboring asteroids and encounters for the first time the strange, narrow-minded world of grown-ups. On the first six planets the little prince visits, he meets a king, a vain man, a drunkard, a businessman, a lamplighter, and a geographer, all of whom live alone and are overly consumed by their chosen occupations. Such strange behavior both amuses and perturbs the little prince. He does not understand their need to order people around, to be admired, and to own everything. With the exception of the lamplighter, whose dogged faithfulness he admires, the little prince does not think much of the adults he visits, and he does not learn anything useful. However, he learns from the geographer that flowers do not last forever, and he begins to miss the rose he has left behind.
At the geographer’s suggestion, the little prince visits Earth, but he lands in the middle of the desert and cannot find any humans. Instead, he meets a snake who speaks in riddles and hints darkly that its lethal poison can send the little prince back to the heavens if he so wishes. The little prince ignores the offer and continues his explorations, stopping to talk to a three-petaled flower and to climb the tallest mountain he can find, where he confuses the echo of his voice for conversation. Eventually, the little prince finds a rose garden, which surprises and depresses him—his rose had told him that she was the only one of her kind.
The prince befriends a fox, who teaches him that the important things in life are visible only to the heart, that his time away from the rose makes the rose more special to him, and that love makes a person responsible for the beings that one loves. The little prince realizes that, even though there are many roses, his love for his rose makes her unique and that he is therefore responsible for her. Despite this revelation, he still feels very lonely because he is so far away from his rose. The prince ends his story by describing his encounters with two men, a railway switchman and a salesclerk.
It is now the narrator’s eighth day in the desert, and at the prince’s suggestion, they set off to find a well. The water feeds their hearts as much as their bodies, and the two share a moment of bliss as they agree that too many people do not see what is truly important in life. The little prince’s mind, however, is fixed on returning to his rose, and he begins making plans with the snake to head back to his planet. The narrator is able to fix his plane on the day before the one-year anniversary of the prince’s arrival on Earth, and he walks sadly with his friend out to the place the prince landed. The snake bites the prince, who falls noiselessly to the sand.
The narrator takes comfort when he cannot find the prince’s body the next day and is confident that the prince has returned to his asteroid. The narrator is also comforted by the stars, in which he now hears the tinkling of his friend’s laughter. Often, however, he grows sad and wonders if the sheep he drew has eaten the prince’s rose. The narrator concludes by showing his readers a drawing of the desert landscape and by asking us to stop for a while under the stars if we are ever in the area and to let the narrator know immediately if the little prince has returned.

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Chapters I–III
Summary: Chapter I
But [a grown-up] would always answer, “That’s a hat.” Then I wouldn’t talk about boa constrictors or jungles or stars. I would put myself on his level and talk about bridge and golf and politics and neckties.
(See Important Quotations Explained)
The novel’s narrator says that when he was six years old, before he became a pilot, he saw in a book a picture of a boa constrictor devouring a wild animal. In the same book, the narrator read that boa constrictors must hibernate for six months after swallowing their prey in order to digest it. Fascinated by this information, the narrator drew his first drawing, which he calls Drawing Number One. The drawing, a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant, looked like a lumpy blob with two flat lines tapering off to the left and right. But grown-ups were not frightened by the picture, because they thought it was supposed to be a hat.

To explain his drawing to adults, the narrator drew Drawing Number Two, an x-ray view of Drawing Number One that showed the elephant inside the snake. Disturbed by this image, grown-ups advised the narrator to give up drawing and pursue geography, arithmetic, and grammar instead. Realizing that grown-ups would always require things to be explained to them, the narrator decided not to be an artist and became a pilot instead. He admits that the geography he learned did prove to be useful for flying.
The narrator’s opinion of adults never improved. Every time he met a grown-up, he would test him by showing him Drawing Number One. The grown-ups would always think it was a picture of a hat. Consequently, the narrator knew he could talk with the grown-ups only about boring, pragmatic topics like politics and neckties.
Summary: Chapter II
The narrator feels lonely his whole life until one day, six years before he tells his story, he crashes his plane in the middle of the Sahara desert. As the situation is beginning to look dire, the pilot is shocked to hear an odd little voice asking him to draw a sheep. He turns to see the little prince. The prince looks like a small, blond child, but he stares intently at the pilot without the fear that a child lost in the desert would have. The pilot does not know how to draw a sheep, so instead he sketches Drawing Number One, and he is astounded when the little prince recognizes it as a picture of an elephant inside a boa constrictor. The little prince rejects Drawing Number One, insisting that he needs a drawing of a sheep. After drawing three different sheep that the prince rejects, the pilot finally draws a box and gives it to the little prince. He says that the box contains exactly the type of sheep for which he is looking. This drawing makes the little prince very happy. The prince wonders if the sheep will have enough grass to eat, explaining that the place where he lives is quite small.
Summary: Chapter III
The pilot tries to find out where his mysterious new friend comes from, but the little prince prefers asking questions to answering them. He questions the pilot about his plane and what it does, and the pilot tells the little prince that it allows him to fly through the air. The little prince takes comfort in the fact that the pilot also came from the sky, asking him what planet he comes from. The pilot is surprised by this question and tries to find out what planet the little prince comes from. But the little prince ignores the pilot’s queries and admires the sheep the pilot has drawn for him. The pilot offers to draw a post and a string to tie the sheep to so that it won’t get lost, but the little prince laughs. The sheep will not get lost, he says, because he comes from a very small planet.
Analysis: Chapters I–III
By beginning his story with a discussion of his childhood drawings, the narrator introduces the idea that perception of an item varies from person to person. The narrator intends for people to see his drawing as a boa constrictor eating an elephant, but most adults can’t see the hidden elephant and think the drawing represents a hat. Throughout The Little Prince, the narrator’s drawings allow Saint-Exupéry to discuss concepts that he would not be able to express adequately in words. Drawings, the novel suggests, are a way of imparting knowledge that is more creative and open to interpretation, and thus more in line with the abstract perspectives of children. Because it must be interpreted, Drawing Number One is an example of a symbol. It is a picture of a hat that actually signifies a boa constrictor that has swallowed an elephant, but the viewer must have the imagination to spot that non-literal meaning.
Chapter II also reinforces these ideas about the power of drawings and the importance of imagination. Saint-Exupéry suggests that, like the narrator and the little prince, the reader will have to use his or her imagination to grasp the real story. The drawings invite the reader to join in the narrator’s encounter with the little prince and to deduce the meaning of the drawings along with the story’s characters. By putting the drawings in the text, Saint-Exupéry is crediting us with the same powers of imagination as those of the little prince and the narrator. It is up to us, therefore, to make the book come to life. We must see the story in the same way that the little prince can see a sheep living and sleeping in the narrator’s drawing of a box.
The way the little prince can immediately see beyond first appearances and perceive the boa constrictor in the narrator’s first drawing and a sheep hidden in a box shows how different children are from adults. The adult perspective in Chapter I is unimaginative, overly pragmatic, and dull, while the childish perspective is creative, full of wonder, and open to the mysterious beauty of the universe. The novel suggests that both adulthood and childhood are states of mind rather than facts of life. The narrator, for example, is an adult when he tells the story, but he longs for companions with the pure perspective of childhood.
The narrator’s loneliness at the beginning of Chapter II shows how important relationships with others are. In the desert, the narrator is stranded from all human contact, but his isolation allows him to indulge in the most fulfilling relationship of his life. Forcibly removed from the corrupting influence of the grown-up world, he is able to embrace the prince and the lessons his new friend has to offer.
The narrator’s constant questioning in Chapters II and III, however, shows that we cannot hope to have answers simply handed to us. In Chapter III, the narrator is full of questions, but if the little prince answers them at all, he does so with oblique, indirect responses. The story suggests that questions are much more important than answers. Later, both the prince and the narrator discuss this lesson in greater detail.
Summary: Chapter XXVI
The following day, the pilot returns from fixing his plane to see the little prince sitting on the wall of a ruin beside the well. The prince is discussing plans for that evening with someone who cannot be seen, and the topic of poison is mentioned. The prince asks his unseen companion to leave so the prince can get off the wall, and when the narrator looks down, he sees a snake. It is the same snake who greeted the prince when he first arrived on Earth. The narrator draws his gun, but the snake escapes, and the narrator is left to take care of the prince, who is pale and frightened. The prince congratulates the pilot on having fixed his plane, and when the narrator asks the prince how he knows about his plane, the prince says only that he will be going on a much longer, more difficult journey.

The prince says he will be even more afraid that night and tries to console the narrator by pointing to the stars and saying they will all have a special, unique meaning for the narrator now that he knows someone who lives among them. Then the prince becomes serious again and asks the pilot not to accompany him that night. The prince cautions that it will look as if he is dying. Also, he does not trust the snake to stop at just one bite and is worried that the snake would bite the pilot as well.
That night the little prince sneaks off by himself, but the narrator catches up and refuses to abandon him. The prince assures the narrator that he will be fine, that his dead body will just be an empty shell too heavy for the prince to take to the heavens with him. The narrator is not convinced, and even the prince grows less certain of his reasoning and finally breaks down in tears. Growing more frightened, the little prince explains that his rose needs him, and then falls silent. The snake strikes at the prince’s ankle, and he falls so gently that he does not make a sound.
Summary: Chapter XXVII
Look up at the sky. Ask yourself, “Has the sheep eaten the flower or not?” And you’ll see how everything changes. And no grown-up will ever understand how such a thing could be so important!
(See Important Quotations Explained)
Six years later, the narrator reflects on the fate of his friend. He knows the prince made it back to his planet because the morning after the snake bit the prince, he could not find the prince’s body. The narrator’s friends are glad to have him back again, and when he looks at the stars, he hears the sounds of many tiny bells.
The narrator worries, however, since he forgot to draw a strap on the sheep’s muzzle, which means it may eat the rose. He sometimes reassures himself that the prince would never let such a thing happen, but then he thinks that accidents can happen, and the sound of bells turns into the sound of tears. He admits that his emotions are a puzzle, as they certainly are for all of us who also loved the little prince. All the same, when he looks up at the sky, the question of whether the sheep has eaten the rose or not has changed the way he sees everything. He remarks, rather incredulously, that a grown-up will never understand this concern.
In a short epilogue, the narrator shows the same illustration of the desert landscape he showed in his final chapter, only he leaves out the prince. He calls his final picture the saddest and loveliest landscape in the world. He asks us to keep an eye out for this landscape if we are ever in the Sahara and to linger under the stars for a while if we do see it. The narrator asks us to lessen his sadness by sending immediate word if we happen to meet the little prince.
Analysis : Chapters XXVI–XXVII
For us, as for the narrator, the story of the little prince ends in mystery. We are left to figure out whether the prince has managed to save his rose. At times, the narrator is sure that the prince’s life on his planet is a happy one. Other times, the narrator hears only the sound of tears. The only thing that is certain is that one of the prince’s first questions, about whether the sheep will eat his rose, has emerged in the end as the most important question of all.
The narrator does not downplay the deep pain he felt because of his friendship with the little prince. Although the narrator mentions that he has other friends, the departure of this one has taken as much from him as it has given him. The story has no qualms about the fact that losing a loved one is painful, and its ending offers no consolation that the narrator’s wounds will heal. On one level, these final chapters are an allegory about dealing with the death of a loved one.
In spite of all this sadness, however, the story staunchly insists that relationships are worth the trouble. The fox and the narrator may both lose the little prince, but their world is enhanced nevertheless—wheat fields and night skies come alive. To emphasize this positive aspect of lost relationships, the narrator describes his desolate final drawing of the barren landscape where the prince fell as both the saddest and the loveliest place in the world. The Little Prince, though it deals with serious and even upsetting issues, emphasizes the idea that good can be derived from sad events. The little prince learns that his rose must die, but this knowledge fires his love for her. The relationship between the narrator and the prince reaches new levels of intensity only after the prince makes it clear that he will depart.