80 pages • 2 hours read
Antoine de Saint-ExupéryThe Little Prince
Fiction | Novella | Middle Grade | Published in 1943A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 16-19Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary
The pilot interrupts the prince's story to describe Earth and its inhabitants as they relate to the prince's journey.
It contains one hundred and eleven kings (including, of course, the African kings), seven thousand geographers, nine-hundred thousand businessmen, seven-and-a-half million drunkards, three-hundred-eleven million vain men; in other words, about two billion grown-ups. […] Before the invention of electricity[there were] four-hundred-sixty-two thousand, five hundred and eleven lamplighters" (47, 48).
He describes the actions of these lamplighters as looking "like a ballet" (48) from a distance, as lights appeared and then flickered out in a wave around the globe. At the North and South Poles, however, lamplighters only needed to work twice a year.
Chapter 17 Summary
The pilot worries that in trying to be "witty" (48) about the lamplighters, he has misled his readers about Earth. He notes how the two billion humans on Earth don’t take up much space: "You could crowd all humanity onto the smallest Pacific islet" (49). Grown-ups, however, find this unbelievable, because they "consider themselves as important as the baobabs" (49). He therefore suggests telling them to do the calculation for themselves, since they like numbers anyway.
Resuming his story, the pilot says that the prince was surprised not to immediately encounter anyone when he came to Earth. Therefore, when a snake approached him, he double-checked that he had come to the right planet. The snake explained that he had, but Earth is a large planet and people don't live in the desert. Rather than responding immediately, the prince looked at the stars and wondered aloud if they "are lit up so that each of us can find his own, someday" (49). The snake then asked why he came to Earth, and the prince said he was "having difficulties with a flower" (49).
After a pause, the prince asked where he could find people. The snake warned him that he might also find it lonely around people, and the prince commented on what a "funny creature"(51)the snake was. The snake replied that he was actually "very powerful" and can "send [anyone] back to the land from which he came" (51)by biting him. He then explained that he pitied the prince and would help him return to his home planet if he ever wanted to. The prince understood the snake's meaning but asked why he insisted on speaking "in riddles," to which the snake replied that he "solve[d] them all" (51).
Chapter 18 Summary
The prince then crossed the desert, finding only a small flower "of no consequence" (51), which he nevertheless greeted. When he asked the flower where he could find people, the flower replied that she had once seen a caravan and thought there might be "six or seven [humans] […] in existence" (53), but that their literal rootlessness made them difficult to find. At that, the prince and flower said goodbye to one another.
Chapter 19 Summary
Next, the prince climbed a mountain, believing he would be able to see all of Earth from the top, since his own mountains are small enough to use as footstools. When he reached the top, however, he only saw "rocky peaks as sharp as needles" (53). He then called out a greeting and—believing his echo to be another person—asked who the person was and offered to be friends. He concluded that "people [on Earth] have no imagination" since he received no response but his own words: "Where I live I had a flower. She always spoke first…" (54).
Chapters 16-19 Analysis
Before describing the prince's experiences on Earth, Saint-Exupéry hammers home just how different the planet is from the others the prince has visited—most notably, in the fact that it is home to billions of people. Ultimately, this insistence on the differences between the planets underscores how similar the people on them are. Although the people on Earth are not physically isolated in the way the other adults the prince has encountered were, their self-absorption in some sense makes each one feel as if he or she were the only person on the planet. As the pilot says, adults find it difficult to believe how little space they actually take up on the planet because their sense of their own importance is so inflated. The exchange with the flower provides a humorous check on this narcissism by revealing how inconsequential humans are to the flower's daily existence, but for humans themselves, the consequences of this self-absorption are serious. As the snake says, it’s quite possible to be lonely even when physically in the presence of other people because so many of those people lack the ability to see beyond themselves and connect meaningfully with others.
The prince's conversation with the snake is also significant for several other reasons. For one, it foreshadows the book's ending, when the prince allows the snake to bite and poison him so that he can return to his home. This in turn relates to the story's interest in impermanence and death; the snake's remark that he "solves all riddles" (51) is both a statement on the inevitability of death and a hint that this inevitability is in some ways what "solves" life's mysteries and gives it meaning. The prince appears the understand this, as well as the snake's other "riddles," which is another testament to the importance of innocence and imagination in uncovering what is true. Finally, the prince's remark about each person having a star of his own speaks to the symbolic role the stars ultimately play in The Little Prince, holding a meaning specific to each individual.
