How did the little prince end? "The Little Prince": analysis. "The Little Prince": a work by Saint-Exupery. The Prince visits the planet of the ambitious

In 1943, the work of interest to us was first published. Let's talk briefly about the background of its creation, and then we will analyze it. "The Little Prince" is a work, the impetus for writing which was one incident that happened to its author.

In 1935, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was in a plane crash while flying in the direction of Paris-Saigon. He ended up in the territory located in the Sahara, in its northeastern part. Memories of this accident and the invasion of the Nazis prompted the author to think about the responsibility for the Earth of people, about the fate of the world. In 1942, he wrote in his diary that he was worried about his generation, devoid of spiritual content. People lead a herd existence. To return spiritual concerns to a person is the task that the writer set himself.

To whom is the work dedicated?

The story that interests us is dedicated to Leon Werth, Antoine's friend. This is important to note when doing the analysis. "The Little Prince" is a story in which everything is filled with deep meaning, including dedication. After all, Leon Werth is a Jewish writer, journalist, critic, victim of persecution during the war. Such a dedication was not just a tribute to friendship, but also a bold challenge by the writer to anti-Semitism and Nazism. In difficult times, Exupery created his fairy tale story. He fought against violence with words and illustrations, which he manually created for his work.

Two worlds in a story

Two worlds are represented in this story - adults and children, as our analysis shows. "The Little Prince" is a work in which this division is by no means done according to age. For example, a pilot is an adult, but he managed to save a child's soul. The author divides people according to ideals and ideas. For adults, the most important are their own affairs, ambition, wealth, power. And the child's soul longs for something else - friendship, mutual understanding, beauty, joy. The antithesis (children and adults) helps to reveal the main conflict of the work - the opposition of two different value systems: real and false, spiritual and material. It deepens further. After leaving the planet, the little prince meets "strange adults" on his way, whom he cannot understand.

Travel and dialogue

The composition is based on travel and dialogue. The general picture of the existence of humanity losing moral values ​​is recreated by the meeting with the "adults" of the little prince.

The protagonist travels in the story from asteroid to asteroid. He visits, first of all, the nearest, where people live alone. Each asteroid has a number, like the apartments of a modern high-rise building. These figures hint at the separation of people who live in neighboring apartments, but live as if on different planets. For the little prince, meeting the inhabitants of these asteroids becomes a lesson in loneliness.

Meeting with the king

On one of the asteroids lived a king who looked at the whole world, like other kings, in a very simplified way. For him, subjects are all people. However, the king was tormented by this question: "Who is to blame for the fact that his orders are impossible?". The king taught the prince that judging oneself is harder than judging others. Having learned this, one can become truly wise. The lover of power loves power, not subjects, and therefore is deprived of the latter.

The Prince visits the planet of the ambitious

On another planet lived an ambitious man. But vain people are deaf to everything except praise. Only the ambitious loves glory, and not the public, and therefore remains without the latter.

Drunkard's Planet

Let's continue the analysis. The little prince ends up on the third planet. His next meeting is with a drunkard who thinks intently about himself and eventually becomes completely confused. This man is ashamed of what he drinks. However, he drinks in order to forget about his conscience.

business man

The business man owned the fourth planet. As the analysis of the fairy tale "The Little Prince" shows, the meaning of his life was to find something that does not have an owner and appropriate it. A business man counts wealth that is not his: he who saves only for himself might as well count the stars. The little prince cannot understand the logic by which adults live. He concludes that it is beneficial for his flower and volcanoes that he owns them. But the stars do not benefit from such possession.

Lamplighter

And only on the fifth planet the main character finds a person with whom he wants to make friends. This is a lamplighter who would be despised by everyone, because he thinks not only of himself. However, his planet is tiny. There is no room for two. The lamplighter is working in vain, because he does not know for whom.

Meeting with a geographer

The geographer, who writes thick books, lived on the sixth planet, which was created in his story by Exupery ("The Little Prince"). The analysis of the work would be incomplete if we did not say a few words about it. This is a scientist, and beauty is ephemeral for him. Nobody needs scientific papers. Without love for a person, it turns out that everything is meaningless - and honor, and power, and labor, and science, and conscience, and capital. The little prince leaves this planet too. The analysis of the work continues with a description of our planet.

Little prince on earth

The last place the prince visited was the strange Earth. When he arrives here, the title character of Exupery's story "The Little Prince" feels even more alone. The analysis of the work when describing it should be more detailed than when describing other planets. After all, the author pays special attention in the story to the Earth. He notices that this planet is not at all home, it is "salty", "all in needles" and "completely dry". It's uncomfortable to live on it. Its definition is given through images that seemed strange to the little prince. The boy notes that this planet is not simple. It is ruled by 111 kings, there are 7,000 geographers, 900,000 businessmen, 7.5 million drunkards, 311 million ambitious people.

The protagonist's journey continues in the following sections. He meets, in particular, with the switchman directing the train, but people do not know where they are going. The boy then sees a merchant who sells anti-thirst pills.

Among the people living here, the little prince feels lonely. Analyzing life on Earth, he notes that there are so many people on it that they cannot feel like one. Millions remain strangers to each other. What do they live for? A lot of people are rushing in fast trains - why? People are not connected by pills or fast trains. And the planet will not become a home without it.

Friendship with the Fox

After analyzing Exupery's The Little Prince, we found out that the boy is bored on Earth. And the Fox, another hero of the work, has a boring life. Both of them are looking for a friend. The fox knows how to find him: you need to tame someone, that is, create bonds. And the main character understands that there are no shops where you can buy a friend.

The author describes the life before the meeting with the boy, which was led by the Fox from the story "The Little Prince". allows us to notice that before this meeting he only fought for his existence: he hunted chickens, and hunters hunted him. The fox, having been tamed, escaped from the circle of defense and attack, fear and hunger. It is to this hero that the formula "only the heart is vigilant" belongs. Love can be transferred to many other things. Having made friends with the main character, the Fox will fall in love with everything else in the world. The close in his mind is connected with the distant.

A pilot in the desert

It is easy to imagine a home planet in habitable places. However, in order to understand what a house is, it is necessary to be in the desert. Exupery's analysis of The Little Prince suggests this idea. In the desert, the main character met a pilot, with whom he then became friends. The pilot ended up here not only because of a malfunction of the aircraft. He has been enchanted by the desert all his life. The name of this desert is loneliness. The pilot understands an important secret: there is meaning in life when there is someone to die for. The desert is a place where a person feels a thirst for communication, thinks about the meaning of existence. It reminds us that the earth is the home of man.

What did the author want to tell us?

The author wants to say that people have forgotten one simple truth: they are responsible for their planet, as well as for those who have been tamed. If we all understood this, there would probably be no wars and economic problems. But people are very often blind, do not listen to their own hearts, leave their home, looking for happiness far from their relatives and friends. Antoine de Saint-Exupery did not write his fairy tale "The Little Prince" for fun. The analysis of the work carried out in this article, we hope, convinced you of this. The writer appeals to all of us, urging us to carefully look at those who surround us. After all, these are our friends. They must be protected, according to Antoine de Saint-Exupery ("The Little Prince"). This concludes the analysis of the work. We invite readers to reflect on this story for themselves and continue the analysis with their own observations.

On a clear day in June 1942, French aviator and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was having lunch at New York's Arnold Café with editor Kurt Hitchcock. Things were not going well for him: after the dissolution of the French troops and the fall of Paris, he was unemployed, grieved over the death of a close friend, and the film adaptation of his book The Planet of the People was postponed indefinitely.

Out of habit, as it often happened to him during gatherings in cafes, Saint-Exupery displayed the figure of a boy on the tablecloth. Hitchcock asked a friend: who is he portraying? “Oh, nothing special,” came the reply. “A little friend that I carry in my heart.” And then, unexpectedly for Antoine, the editor suggested that he write a fairy tale about a little friend for children. The idea took Exupery by surprise. By that time, he had already managed to publish the novels "Southern Postal", "Night Flight", "Citadel" and "Planet of People" and become the owner of the Grand Prize of the French Academy and the US National Book Prize. But he hardly imagined himself as a writer of fairy tales.

However, very soon depressed St. Ex, as his friends called him, will find that working on a magical story for children is exactly what he needs in this difficult time. Writing will be salvation, and in 9 months, on April 6, 1943, The Little Prince will see the light of day.

It is worth noting that success for the sad story of a naive boy who arrived on Earth from a tiny asteroid B-612 did not come immediately. Critics greeted her rather coolly, and the reader simply did not understand. Only a year after the book's release, Commonwell magazine published a review by critic Harry Louis Beans, who called Exupery's work "a sad classic that makes you cry."

A few more years will pass, and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger will call The Little Prince one of the greatest works of existentialism of the twentieth century.

What did the French pilot and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery want to tell his reader about, creating a story about a golden-haired boy, an arrogant Rose and a devoted Fox? And why do researchers of his work call this tale autobiographical? To answer these questions, we suggest recalling quotes from the work.

All adults were children at first, only few of them remember this.

As a child, he was called Tonio. The son of aristocrats, he spent his happy years between a cozy apartment in Lyon and the family castle of Saint-Maurice-de-Remans, where in the summer he helped the gardener care for flowers, climbed into the attic with his sisters on rainy days, arranged snail races during picnics in a chestnut tree. woods and watched the lamplighter of Saint-Maurice light one lamp after another in the street to the croaking of frogs in the evenings.

When he lights his lantern, it is as if another star or flower is being born. And when he extinguishes the lantern, it is as if a star or a flower falls asleep. Great job. It's really useful because it's beautiful.

Years will pass - and he will remember this carefree time during long flights and trips to distant countries, during the occupation of France by German troops and forced emigration to the United States. "I'm not sure I lived after childhood," he wrote in a letter to his mother.

The boy who arrived on our Earth from another planet is little Tony, whom Saint-Ex will lose one day and who will be greatly missed.

But I, unfortunately, cannot see the lamb through the walls of the box. Maybe I'm a bit like adults. I must be getting old.

At the age of 12, he took to the air for the first time. The car was driven by the famous pilot Gabriel Wroblewski, and Antoine immediately fell in love with this feeling of weightlessness and excitement that you experience at altitude. Another 10 years will pass, and he will successfully pass the exam for a civilian pilot, and a little later - for a military one. On his first aircraft, serial number A-612, he will carry mail between Toulouse and Perpignan, and then on to Spain and Dakar.

I have good reason to believe that the Little Prince came from a planet called Asteroid B-612. This asteroid was seen through a telescope only once, in 1909, by a Turkish astronomer.

We can say that Exupery's flying career was going up. In October 1927, he was appointed head of the airfield in Cap Juby - now it is the town of Tarfaya on the outskirts of Morocco. In total, he then lived in Western Sahara for three years.

This wild world of endless sands, inhabited by snakes and miniature fennec foxes, which Exupery enthusiastically described in letters to his sister Didi, was not at all like a desert created by people. It was in those years, filled with loneliness, that the future writer was filled with boundless love for the Sahara.

I've always liked the desert. You sit on a sand dune. I can not see anything. I can not hear anything. And yet something shines in the silence.

In March 1929, Exupery's term in the desert ended. Soon he received the position of technical director of the Aeropostal (later part of Air France) branch in Argentina. This appointment became fateful for him: on the hot Latin American land, a Rose has already grown, which one day will become for him the only one in the whole world.

Her name was Consuelo Suenzin. She was 30 when Exupery met her at the Los Amigos del Arte center in Buenos Aires. Usually preferring tall blondes, that evening he did not take his eyes off the petite brunette.

On the planet of the Little Prince, simple, modest flowers always grew - they had few petals, they took up very little space and did not bother anyone. They opened in the morning in the grass and withered in the evening. And this one once sprouted from a grain brought in from nowhere, and the Little Prince did not take his eyes off the tiny sprout, unlike all other sprouts and blades of grass.

They left the party together: at sunset, he put her in the co-pilot seat in his plane, and after flying over the electric fires of Buenos Aires, he read to her chapters from the still unfinished Southern Post Office all night long. Years later, in Memoirs of a Rose, Consuelo writes about this meeting:

“I woke up at night and he gave me hot broth to drink. Then he showed a film that he made himself.

This is what I see after the flights, he explained.

Images succeeded each other to the accompaniment of strange Indian songs. I couldn’t take it anymore - this man made too strong an impression, his inner world was too rich. A few days later she agreed to become his wife.

It was a very proud flower.

Their union was not easy. She was a friend of Maeterlinck and Dali, and Exupery passionately loved this talented, wayward and temperamental woman. But at the same time, he was annoyed, offended, angry, left and returned again.

I did not understand anything then! It was necessary to judge not by words, but by deeds. She gave me her fragrance, lit up my life. I shouldn't have run. Behind these miserable tricks and tricks one should have guessed tenderness. The flowers are so inconsistent! But I was too young, I didn't know how to love yet.

The doubts that the writer experienced more than once during his relationship with this woman, in The Little Prince, he embodied in the image of a field sown with many roses. From time to time, he had mistresses - "beautiful, but empty", but it was "she gave the fragrance to drink and lit it." And so he put important words into the mouth of the Fox: “Do not forget: you are forever responsible for everyone you tamed. You are responsible for your rose."

It was Consuelo who persuaded her husband to heed the advice of editor Hitchcock and write a children's fairy tale, it was about her that he thought during night flights, looking at the stars.

If you love a flower that grows somewhere on a distant star, it is good to look at the sky at night. All stars are blooming.

The extinct craters on the planet where this beautiful Rose grew are a reference to the three volcanoes of El Salvador, where Exupery's wife was from. The eruption of one of them - Izalko - Antoine caught during a trip to Consuelo's homeland: fire-breathing mountains covered with frozen magma could be seen directly from the windows of the parental home.

It had two active volcanoes. They are very convenient in the morning to warm up breakfast. In addition, he had another extinct one.

At the end of 1935, exhausted by constant skirmishes with Consuelo, Antoine decides to make the longest flight by plane and break the world record of 98 hours 52 minutes, reaching from Paris to Saigon, in southern Vietnam. Despite his wife's persuasion to stay, in the early morning of December 29, he, along with a mechanic, boarded the plane and took off. They crossed France, then the Mediterranean Sea, flew to Egyptian Alexandria, where, after refueling, they went further - to the zone of the endless sands of the Sahara. Late at night, believing that Cairo was nearby, Exupery went downhill ... and at a speed of 270 km / h flew into a huge sandy massif. The plane crashed, the pilot with the mechanic was lucky to survive. But they were in the middle of an endless desert, their tank was empty. The supply of provisions also did not inspire optimism: a small thermos of coffee, some wine, a few grapes and an orange. Already in the evening they saw mirages and only three days later, dying of thirst and the scorching sun, they were saved by the Bedouins.

The first night I fell asleep on the sand in the desert, where there was no habitation for thousands of miles around. A man shipwrecked and lost on a raft in the middle of the ocean, and he would not be so alone.

They returned to France as heroes. Soon, Exupery will begin working on newspaper reports covering the Spanish Civil War, and will prepare essays for Planet of the People.

On September 4, 1939, the day after France declared war on Germany, he appeared at the place of mobilization at the Toulouse-Montodran military airfield. He was assigned to the 2/33 reconnaissance squadron, where he served until the surrender of the Third Republic in May 1940.

Hatred of Nazism is growing, the desire to fight the hated regime is growing stronger every day. Unable to face the horrors of civilization, he will describe his fear for humanity in the Little Prince's naive tale of powerful baobabs destroying the planet.

These are baobab seeds. The soil of the planet is all infected with them. And if the baobab is not recognized in time, then you will not get rid of it. He will take over the entire planet. He will pierce it through with his roots. And if the planet is very small and there are many baobabs, they will tear it to pieces.

The war took away from Exupery his native France, where he spent the happy years of his childhood, it deprived him of his close friend and partner Henri Guillaume, whose plane was attacked by an Italian fighter. An ardent opponent of the Vichy collaborationist regime, at the end of 1940 he was forced to leave his homeland occupied by the Germans and move to America.

I don't like to pass death sentences. And anyway, it's time for me.

Here he felt like in a real desert - among skyscrapers and crowds of indifferent people, mindlessly wandering the streets and unable to enjoy simple things. In the summer of 1942, suffering from the heat that hangs over Manhattan (which Salinger described well in the story “Above the Rafters, Carpenters”), he writes in “Letter to the Hostage”: “The desert is not at all where it seems. There is incomparably more life in the Sahara than in the capital, and a crowded city full of bustle is the same desert if the magnetic poles of life have lost their strength.

This appeal on behalf of an emigrant to forty million French people appeared simultaneously with The Little Prince and in many respects echoed a naive children's fairy tale, the hero of which does not share the values ​​of a king and a businessman. In the Letter to the Hostage, Exupery repeats a simple truth: above all, it is worth appreciating simple things - the joy of a smile, the warmth of friendship, which people forget about in an age of tyranny and commerce.

If I had fifty-three free minutes, I would simply go to the spring.

Two weeks after the release of The Little Prince in an American publishing house, he leaves the United States. "I cannot be away from those who are hungry," he writes, and joins de Gaulle's free French forces in Algiers to continue his fight for childhood dreams in the adult world.

People no longer have time to learn anything. They buy things ready-made in stores. But after all, there are no shops where friends would trade, and therefore people no longer have friends.

The Little Prince is a tale of loneliness. The lost hero of this story resembles a modern man who lives on a planet where there is less and less chance of finding a "gardener for people." Little Tony is lost in the adult world. A happy child who loved the smell of flowers and the sound of rain became a disillusioned adult. Mankind has ceased to appreciate poetry, colors and love.

On July 31, 1944, just before his death, he wrote: “If I am shot down, I will not regret anything. I'm terrified of the coming anthill. I hate the virtue of robots. I was created to be a gardener." He went on his last flight, thinking that "it is no longer possible to live with refrigerators, politics, balance sheets and crossword puzzles" - and did not return back.

Was it suicide, desertion or an accident - no one knew. Exupery disappeared without a trace. It wasn't until 1998, 45 years after the pilot's disappearance, that a fisherman off the coast of Marseille found a bracelet engraved with "Antoine" and "Cozuelo" and the New York address of the publisher that published The Little Prince. After another 5 years, the wreckage of the aircraft on which Saint-Ex made its last flight was found at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea.

And if a little boy with golden hair comes up to you, if he laughs loudly and does not answer your questions, you will certainly guess who he is. Then - I beg you! - do not forget to console me in my sadness. Please let me know that he's back...

“After all, all adults were children at first, only few of them remember this.”

This book can be read in 30 minutes, but this fact did not prevent the book from becoming a world classic. The author of the story is the French writer, poet and professional pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupery. This allegorical story is the most famous work of the author. It was first published in 1943 (April 6) in New York. It is interesting that the drawings in the book were made by the author himself and became no less famous than the book itself.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger de Saint-Exupery(French Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger de Saint-Exup?ry; June 29, 1900, Lyon, France - July 31, 1944) - a famous French writer, poet and professional pilot.

To a summary of the story

At the age of six, the boy read about how a boa constrictor swallows its prey, and drew a snake that swallowed an elephant. It was a drawing of a boa constrictor on the outside, but the adults claimed it was a hat. Adults always need to explain everything, so the boy made another drawing - a boa constrictor from the inside. Then the adults advised the boy to give up this nonsense - according to them, he should have done more geography, history, arithmetic and spelling. So the boy abandoned a brilliant career as an artist. He had to choose another profession: he grew up and became a pilot, but as before, he showed his first drawing to those adults who seemed to him smarter and more intelligent than the rest, and everyone answered that it was a hat. It was impossible to talk heart to heart with them - about boas, jungles and stars. And the pilot lived alone until he met the Little Prince.

This happened in the Sahara. Something broke in the plane's engine: the pilot had to fix it or die, because there was only water left for a week. At dawn, the pilot was awakened by a thin voice - a tiny baby with golden hair, unknown how he got into the desert, asked him to draw a lamb for him. The astonished pilot did not dare to refuse, especially since his new friend was the only one who managed to make out in the first drawing a boa constrictor that had swallowed an elephant. Gradually it turned out that the Little Prince came from a planet called "asteroid B-612" - of course, the number is only needed for boring adults who love numbers.

The whole planet was the size of a house, and the Little Prince had to take care of her: every day to clean three volcanoes - two active and one extinct, and also weed out baobab sprouts. The pilot did not immediately understand the danger baobabs pose, but then he guessed and, in order to warn all the children, he drew a planet where a lazy person lived, who did not weed out three bushes in time. But the Little Prince always put his planet in order. But his life was sad and lonely, so he loved to watch the sunset - especially when he was sad. He did this several times a day, simply by moving his chair to follow the sun. Everything changed when a wonderful flower appeared on his planet: it was a beauty with thorns - proud, touchy and ingenuous. The little prince fell in love with her, but she seemed to him capricious, cruel and arrogant - he was then too young and did not understand how this flower lit up his life. And so the Little Prince cleaned his volcanoes for the last time, pulled out the sprouts of baobabs, and then said goodbye to his flower, which only at the moment of farewell admitted that he loved him.

He went on a journey and visited six neighboring asteroids. The king lived on the first: he wanted to have subjects so much that he offered the Little Prince to become a minister, and the kid thought that adults were a very strange people. On the second planet lived an ambitious on third- drunkard on the fourth- a business man fifth- lamplighter. All adults seemed extremely strange to the Little Prince, and only he liked the Lamplighter: this man remained faithful to the agreement to light the lamps in the evenings and extinguish the lanterns in the mornings, although his planet was so reduced that day and night changed every minute. Don't be so small here. The little prince would have stayed with the Lamplighter, because he really wanted to make friends with someone - besides, on this planet you could admire the sunset one thousand four hundred and forty times a day!

A geographer lived on the sixth planet. And since he was a geographer, he was supposed to ask travelers about the countries where they came from in order to write down their stories in books. The little prince wanted to tell about his flower, but the geographer explained that only mountains and oceans are written in books, because they are eternal and unchanging, and flowers do not live long. Only then did the Little Prince realize that his beauty would soon disappear, and he left her alone, without protection and help! But the insult has not yet passed, and the Little Prince went on, but he thought only of his abandoned flower.

Earth was with food- a very difficult planet! Suffice it to say that there are one hundred and eleven kings, seven thousand geographers, nine hundred thousand businessmen, seven and a half million drunkards, three hundred and eleven million ambitious people - a total of about two billion adults. But the Little Prince made friends only with the snake, the Fox and the pilot. The snake promised to help him when he bitterly regrets his planet. And Fox taught him to be friends. Everyone can tame someone and become his friend, but you always need to be responsible for those whom you have tamed. And the Fox also said that only the heart is vigilant - you cannot see the most important thing with your eyes. Then the Little Prince decided to return to his rose, because he was responsible for it. He went to the desert - to the very place where he fell. So they met the pilot. The pilot drew him a lamb in a box and even a muzzle for a lamb, although he used to think that he could only draw boas - inside and out. The little prince was happy, but the pilot felt sad - he realized that he was also tamed. Then the Little Prince found a yellow snake, whose bite kills in half a minute: she helped him, as promised. The snake can return everyone to where he came from - she returns people to the earth, and she returned the Little Prince to the stars. The kid told the pilot that it would only look like death, so there is no need to be sad - let the pilot remember him, looking at the night sky. And when the Little Prince laughs, it will seem to the pilot that all the stars are laughing like five hundred million bells.

The pilot fixed his plane and his comrades rejoiced at his return. Since then six years have passed: little by little he was comforted and fell in love with looking at the stars. But he is always excited: he forgot to draw a muzzle strap, and the lamb could eat the rose. Then it seems to him that all the bells are crying. After all, if the rose is no longer in the world, everything will be different, but no adult will ever understand how important this is.