On the surface it is a short story for children, but in reality it is a story of a child written for grown-ups or, if one so wishes, a going back, a return to childhood, "that huge territory that is our origin." "All grownups were first children, but few of them remember it. The book is aimed at all grown-ups who have already forgotten the child that they once were, the child that still sleeps within them.
Saint-Exupéry was always faithful to his childhood. In all his books we come across memories of his childhood, a time of complete happiness and innocence. The plot of The Little Prince is very simple. The little prince lives on a tiny asteroid, and he shares it with a whimsical flower and three volcanoes. But he has "problems" with the flower and feels lonely. Until one day he decides to leave the planet and look for a friend. While he looks for friendship he travels over several planets inhabited sucessively by a king, a conceited man, a tippler, a business man, a lamp lighter, a geographer. The approach to "important matters" of the "grown-ups" leaves him perplexed, and throws him into confusion.
As he travels on, he arrives at the planet Earth, but he feels lonelier than ever in its hugeness and emptiness. A snake introduces him to a pessimistic vision of men and how little one can expect of them. The fox does not contribute to better his opinions, but teaches him how to make friends: one has to set up ties, one has to let oneself be "tamed". At the end he makes him a present of his secret: "Only with the heart can one see fully. Essential matters are invisible to the eyes."
Suddenly the little prince realizes that he has been "tamed" by a flower, and decides to go back to his planet using the quick means put at his disposal by the snake. It is then that he meets the pilot who also was suffering from loneliness, and as the little prince disappears, the man finds a friend...
Despite its apparent simplicity, The Little Prince establishes the question mark which conditions our existence. It is a total change of values. To the question about essential matters in life, the answer is surprising and disquieting. All that men consider serious and important is small matter and without sense in the eyes of the little prince, whereas all that men consider unimportant is in fact the reason of existence for the little prince.
His ironical judgement about the earth cannot be more eloquent: "The earth is not just an ordinary planet! One can count there one hundred and eleven kings (not forgetting, of course, the Negro kings among them), seven thousand geographers, nine hundred thousand businessmen, seven million five hundred thousand tipplers, three hundred and eleven million conceited men, that is to say, about two thousand million grown-ups."
In order to get out of the emptiness that surrounds men in solitude, one has to resort to friendship, love, one has to resort to oneself. In the end we realize that the charming "little prince" is nothing else but the "duplicate" of Saint-Exupéry, it is the child living inside him that stirs him and guides him, the child that wakes up in the crucial moments of his life and prevents him from taking stupid decisions like many a "grown up" who believe only in numbers, in demonstrations, in the seriousness of logic, more than in the seriousness of the heart.
In short one might say that The Little Prince is a quiet meditation about the solitude of man -often a result of his conceit- and about friendship, the only elixir capable of enriching human life and of re-establishing lost relationships among men.