book report of《The Little Prince》小王子

The Little Prince

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry （29 June 1900—31 July 1944)，French aviator and writer, real life hero who looked at adventure and danger with poet's eyes - sometimes from the viewpoint of a child. World War II Saint-Exupéry served as a pilot. He was shot down on a mission over France in 1944. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born in Lyons into an old family of provincial nobility. He was educated at Jesuit schools in Montgréand when he was 15 years old. After failing his final examination at a university preparatory school, he entered the école des Beaux-Arts to study architecture. 1921 had became the turning point of his life ,he became a pilot with license ,after that he took an office job and started to write in Paris .Most of his works were about flying.

《The Little Prince》is his most famous work (1943), which he also illustrated. He drew the illustration for the novel . It has become one of the classics of children's literature of the 20th century. This is a fairy tale which especially for grown-ups.

The main idea “Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and for ever explaining things to them” cross the whole book. It shows the serious word in a little boy’s eyes and explained the complicated theories in a sample way. Just like the little prince said in the book “Grown-ups are so strange”. Older they were, easier to forget the essence of things. Those grown-ups only cared for the numbers and the appearance. They confused everything and got it all mixed up. But the little prince, a lonely sad boy who lived in a planet no bigger than a house knew the word well——“one sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes”.

The little prince loves a rose of which just one example exists among all the millions and millions of stars，that’s enough to make him happy when he looks at the stars. But the flower’s oversensitive vanity hurts the little prince so he decided to leave the star which he lives, starts to travel.

In the journey, he met a King were both an absolute monarch and kindly man who loves commanding; a vanity person who needs endless admiration; a strange drunkard just keep drinking to forget the shame of drinking; a businessman only likes calculating the astronomy number type money; a dull lamplighter keeps working all round the clock; a geographer who wrote the enormous book but never saw the word by himself. Their only common ground, in the heart fills the vanity. In the travel, the young prince discovered that, those people always does not will satisfy oneself lives, they are pursuing happiness with hardship, but actually frequently crudely happily expels from the side and don’t know what they really want. Those experiences plunged the little prince into a depression. With the advice of the geographer, finally he came to last planet——earth. In his mind, this is a peculiar planet. It’s all dry and sharp and hard. And people here have no imagination.

It was happened that the little prince walked to a rose garden and saw thousands of flowers just looked like his flower. He felt unhappy, because his flower had told him she was the only one of her kind in the whole universe. Then the fox appeared

and it taught him that “to create ties” is the key of “tamed”. Because of “tamed” we have special connection with the one we cared for. “Language is the source of misunderstandings” the fox also said that.

At the end of the story, the little prince back to his planet. But his loyalty to a flower impressed me most. The description of the little prince fairy tale is that not deceptive by adult world, and eventually find their own ideals. This ideal is to link everything in the universe of love, which love is missing in the world. This book is not only won the children's readers, but also loved by adults, concise language permeated the work of human beings and human civilization and deep thought. It demonstrated the irony and fantasy, truth and philosophy, making France the world's most famous and even a fairy tale novel.