After a month, I finally have a chance to update this blog. This months I’ve been so busy with my school assignments and works until it was kind of hard for me to write on this blog. Now, since it’s still the beginning of mid-term break, I have a lot of time to do whatever I want and I choose to update my blog with a book review of The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery.
I’ve been wanting to write a review about this book since several years ago. The Little Prince is one of the most famous classic book, and many people has mistaken it as a children book. For me, it make sense why people thought that way. The book itself is really thin, the word choices are relatively easy to understand, and there are so many illustrations in it. But actually, the writer; Antoine De Saint-Exupery, wrote in the foreword that The Little Prince is a book made for ‘adults who have been children before’.
The book starts with a story about the narrator who ever dreamed about becoming an artist, but then had an awful experience related to it. He always think that adults lack imagination eversince he made a drawing of a snake eating an elephant, but apparently everyone thought it was a hat. So, his dream of being an artist stopped since then, and became a pilot when he was older.
I showed my masterpiece to the grown-ups, and asked them whether the drawing frightened them.
But they answered: “Frighten? Why should any one be frightened by a hat?”
My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. But since the grown-ups were not able to understand it, I made another drawing: I drew the inside of the boa constrictor, so that the grown-ups could see it clearly. They always need to have things explained.
One day, his plane crashed in the desert. While struggling to fix his airplane, he met a little boy who asked him to draw a sheep. He was clearly surprised because of many factors. The first factor is because he crashed in the middle of nowhere and definitely far from any inhabited region. Yet that kid didn’t seem tired, hungry, nor thirsty. The second factor is because, no matter how many times he tried to draw a sheep, the little boy didn’t like it, until the narrator made a drawing of a box and said that the sheep is inside.
After a long talk, the narrator found out that the little boy (whom he called ‘the Little Prince’ by now) live in a very small planet with a companion of a beautiful rose that he truly cares about. From there the story continues to when the Little Prince leave his planet and met many creatures he saw with his sincere mind.
Overall, the Little Prince and the narrator spent eight days living in the desert. On the eighth day, the Little Prince said that he will travel back to his planet soon. The Little Prince said that the stars will be very meaningful to the narrator, knowing that one of his friend is living on one of it.
At the end of this book, the narrator describe how hurtful it was when he saw the Little Prince got bit by a snake so that he can return to his planet. Then he end it with a note to keep a look around of the Little Prince whenever the readers are in the desert incase he come back to find that narrator.
From this story, it shows how grown-ups or adults more likely to be narrow minded and see everything way too literally, while children see the world with an open and sincere mind. So in my opinion, this book reminds us to always be truthful and positive towards people around us especially the one that cares about us. It is because we never know when we will leave that certain person, and being truthful to other people can leads to a more positive environment that all of us always wanted in one point of our life.
Ayunda Damai 