The impression of reading “The Little Prince”

When I was in the high school, my teacher had introduced this book, The Little Prince, to us. But at that time, I thought it was the fairy tale and I had no interest in reading it. After I went to the college, I knew more things about this book. This book written by the French author, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, is very famous in the world and it has been translated into more than 160 languages. Many grown-ups like this book very much. They say this book is written for grown-ups which can make them think of some precious experiences in their childhood.

After reading this book, I feel it is really good and worth reading. The story is about “I” who is the narrator of the story make the acquaintance of the little prince, a lonely and sad child from another planet named Asteroid B612. He leaves the planet because he has some quarrel with a rose. Then, he visits the neighbor planets and meets with a king, a conceited man, a drunkard, a businessman, a lamplighter and a geographer. He thinks these people are too strange and he doesn’t like them. At last, he travels on earth and meets with a fox. The fox helps him learn love and responsibility. Finally, the little prince decides to go back to his planet to take care of his friend, the rose.

At the beginning of the book, it satirizes that the grown-ups lose their imagination. They don’t waste time on extra work. “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. And my grown-up was glad to know such a reasonable person.” The narrator feels lonely because the people around him can’t understand what he says. What he can do is to adapt to the grown-up’s world and say what the grown-up likes. In daily life, people now lose their imagination and care more about the reality. They work so hard for money, right and profit that they forget what they really are and what they really want. They don’t stop to enjoy their lives and think what their true values are.

I like the little prince’s attitude toward world. He loves his planet very much. He rakes out his active volcanoes and pulls up the baobabs regularly to protect his planet. These things are all small, but it is quite happy and warm when he does these, I think. The little prince is like an angle, full of love, peace, pure and beauty. We all had these in our childhood. When we were children, we played and made friends with the animals. When we were children, we smiled with the grass, flowers and trees. When we were children, we thought the stars were nictitating in the sky. But when we grow up, we forget these things and care about what we think are important such as

money, study and job. We treat the world as an adult and become a busy people. We can’t feel happy when we plant a tree. We can’t feel happy when we smell the flower. We can’t feel happy when we play with the water and the clay. We lose ourselves and the happiness. As we all know, we can’t always be in the childhood, but we can have the childishness. With the childishness, the life we have will be more happy and free.

What impresses me most is what the fox tells the little prince. “Anything essential is invisible to the eyes. It’s the time you spent on your rose that makes your rose so important. You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed. You’re responsible for your rose.” The fox helps the little prince know that the rose in his planet is unique because it is his rose and tamed by him. He should be responsible for it. For the rose, the little prince is also the unique. They are friends and they need each other. That makes me think about the friendship we have. When we make friends, the first thing we should do is to make relationship with them sincerely. Then, we should spend much time knowing and caring each other. When we become friends, it is forever. We love and need each other. We should be responsible for our friendship and treasure it.

When you read the book, you will feel peace and purify. The book is deserved to be read for several times. At each time you read, you will have a new idea of your life.

 

第二篇：The Little Prince

The Little Prince (French: Le Petit Prince), published in 1943, is French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's most

famous novella. Saint-Exupéry wrote it while living in the United States. It has been translated into more than 190

languages and has sold more than 80 million copies,[1][2] making it the biggest selling French-language book and one

of the best selling books ever.

An earlier memoir by the author recounts his aviation experiences in the Saharan desert. He is thought to have drawn

on these same experiences for use as plot elements in The Little Prince.

Saint-Exupéry's novella has been adapted to

various media over the decades, including stage, screen and operatic works

Though ostensibly a children's book, (with most editions including illustrations drawn by Exupery himself) The

Little Prince makes several profound and idealistic observations about life and human nature. For example, Saint-

Exupéry tells of a fox meeting the young prince as he exits the Sahara desert. The story's essence is contained in

the lines uttered by the fox to the little prince: "On ne voit bien qu'avec le c?ur. L'essentiel est invisible pour

les yeux." ("One sees clearly only with the heart. The essential is invisible to the eyes.") Other key thematic

messages are articulated by the fox, such as: "You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed" and "C'est

le temps que tu as perdu pour ta rose qui fait ta rose si importante." ("It is the time you have lost for your rose

that makes your rose so important.")

Though ostensibly a children's book, (with most editions including illustrations drawn by Exupery himself)

The

Little Prince makes several profound and idealistic observations about life and human nature. For example, Saint-

Exupéry tells of a fox meeting the young prince as he exits the Sahara desert. The story's essence is contained in

the lines uttered by the fox to the little prince: "On ne voit bien qu'avec le c?ur. L'essentiel est invisible pour

les yeux." ("One sees clearly only with the heart. The essential is invisible to the eyes.") Other key thematic

messages are articulated by the fox, such as: "You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed" and

"C'est

le temps que tu as perdu pour ta rose qui fait ta rose si importante." ("It is the time you have lost for your rose

that makes your rose so important.")

The Visit to Earth

Chapter 16 begins: "So then the seventh planet was the Earth." On the Earth, he starts out in the desert and meets a

snake that claims to have the power to return him to his home planet (A clever way to say that he can kill people,

thus whomever he touches, he can "send back to the land from whence he came.") The prince meets a

desert-flower,

who, having seen a caravan pass by, tells him that there are only a handful of men on Earth and that they have no

roots, which lets the wind blow them around making life hard on them. The little prince climbs the highest mountain

he has ever seen. From the top of the mountain, he hopes he will see the whole planet and find people, but he sees

only a desolate, craggy landscape. When the prince calls out, his echo answers him, and he mistakes it for the

voices of humans. He thinks Earth is unnecessarily sharp and hard, and he

finds it odd that the people of Earth only

repeat what he says to them.

Eventually, the prince comes upon a whole row of rosebushes, and is downcast because he thought that his rose was

the only one in the whole universe. He begins to feel that he is not a great prince at all, as his planet contains

only three tiny volcanoes and a flower he now thinks of as common. He lies down in the grass and weeps.

Chapter 21: is the author's statement about human love in that the prince then meets and tames a fox, who explains

to the prince that his rose is unique and special, because she is the one whom he loves. He also explains that in a

way he has tamed the flower, as she has tamed him, and that this is why he now feels responsible for her.

Chapter 22–23: The prince then meets a railway switchman and a merchant who provide further comments on the

ridiculousness and absurdity of much of the human condition. The switchman tells the prince how passengers

constantly rush from one place to another aboard trains, never satisfied with where they are and not knowing what

they are after, only the children amongst them bothering to look out of the windows. The merchant tells the prince

about his product, a pill which eliminates thirst and is therefore very popular, saving people fifty-three minutes a

week; the prince replies that he would use the time to walk and find fresh water.

Chapter 24: the narrator's point of view changes again from third person to first person. The narrator is dying of

thirst, but then he and the prince find a well. After some thought, the prince bids an emotional farewell to the

narrator, explaining to him that while it will look as though he has died, he has not, but rather that his body is

too heavy to take with him to his planet. He tells the narrator that it was wrong of the narrator to come and watch,

as it will make him sad. The narrator, at this point, is so devastated with grief, as he realizes what will

inevitably happen, that he can barely speak. He tries to commit to not leaving the prince's side. The prince allows

the snake to bite him and the next morning, when the narrator looks for the prince, he finds the boy's body has

disappeared. The story ends with a

portrait of the landscape where the meeting of the prince and the narrator took

place and where the snake took the prince's life. The picture is deliberately vague but the narrator also makes a

plea that anyone encountering a strange child in that area who refuses to answer questions should contact the

narrator immediately.

The little prince is represented as having been on Earth for one year, and the narrator ends the story six years

after he is rescued from the desert.

[edit] Inspiration

In The Little Prince, Saint-Exupéry

talks about being stranded in the desert beside a crashed aircraft. This account

clearly draws on his own experience in the Sahara, an ordeal he described in detail in his book Wind, Sand and

Stars.

On December 30, 1935 at 14:45, after 18 hours and 36 minutes in the air, Saint-Exupéry, along with his navigator

André Prévot, crashed in the Libyan Sahara desert. They were attempting to break the record for the Paris-to-Saigon

flight and win a prize of 150,000 francs. Their plane was a Caudron C-600 Simoun n° 7042 (serial F-ANRY). The crash

site is thought to have been located in the Wadi Natrum. Both survived the crash, only to face rapid dehydration.

Their maps were primitive and ambiguous. Lost in the desert with a few grapes, a single orange, and some wine, the

pair had only one day's worth of liquid. After the first day, they had nothing. They both began to see mirages,

which were quickly followed by more vivid hallucinations. Between the second and the third day, they were so

dehydrated that they stopped sweating altogether. Finally, on the fourth day, a Bedouin on a camel discovered them

and administered a native rehydration

treatment that saved Saint-Exupéry and Prévot's lives.

In the desert, Saint-Exupéry had met a fennec (desert sand fox), which most likely inspired him to create the fox

character in the book. In a letter written to his sister Didi from Cape Juby in 1918, he tells her about raising a

fennec that he adored.

Patachou, Petit Gar?on, by Tristan Derème, is another probable influence for The Little Prince.[citation needed]

Antoine may have drawn inspiration for the little prince's appearance from himself as a youth. Friends and family

would call him "le Roi-Soleil" ("Sun

King"), due to his golden curly hair.

The little prince's reassurance to the Pilot that his dying body is only an empty shell resembles the last words of

Antoine's younger brother Fran?ois: "Don't worry. I'm all right. I can't help it. It's my body" (Airman's Odyssey).