The Little Prince’s Existensial Journey
Camus’s absurdism in the little prince
Posted on November 2023
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Those are the words of Albert Camus, one of many thinkers who work deeply on suicide. All other things besides suicide, such as whether or not multiverses exist, the trolley problem, or the invisible hand of capitalism, are just games.
No other book best represented this paragraph other than The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery, my favorite fiction ever.
Brief Summary of the Story
The book is told from the point of view of a pilot who recalled his experience when he was stranded in a desert. This is a bit interesting because Exupery himself is also a pilot. The pilot, while trying to fix his plane met a curious odd-looking boy. At first, there seems to be nothing wrong with the boy. However, it soon came to the realization that the boy did not come from the earth. He comes from another planet and he is the prince of the planet. The story then progresses as the pilot tells his meeting with the little prince. As it turns out, the Earth is not the only planet that the little prince visits. He has visited quite a few others beforehand.
At this point, I haven’t brought up the reason why the little prince began his journey. On his planet, there are two volcanoes that need to be cleaned every day and one rose that is beautiful but can’t stop irritating him. Getting tired and bored of what he experienced, he began his journey.
The little prince’s journey has taught him many things about life, about relationships and responsibility. At the end of the story, the little prince tries to going back to his planet with the help of a snake.
Existensial journey
The Little Prince is not just an ordinary children’s story with interesting illustrations. It’s a story that can be interpreted to many different interpretations. I would argue that one can perceive different things depending on when one read this book in different a phase of one life, such as when one was young, adult, and old. In what follows is one of my interpretations of The Little Prince at the time of writing.
The Little Prince is a story of an existential journey. The premise of the little prince’s journey is the dissatisfaction of his monotonic planet. On his planet he has two volcanoes, one is active and one is inactive, as tall as his knee. He also has only one rose growing on his planet. The rose is a symbol of meaning that can be obtained from relationship, actualization, or attitude. He then grows tired of his relationship with his rose and decides to experience new things.
Absurdism is a central piece in The Little Prince. Throughout the story, the little prince meets so many people that is absurd. He met a king who ruled over the inevitable.
“The king basically demanded respect of his authority and couldn’t put up with no disobedience. He monarchy was term less. But, because he was a very good man, he made his orders reasonable”
The geographer knows everything but never experiences everything. He defined himself as
“A georapher is a scholar who knows the location of all the seas, rivers, towns, mountains, and deserts”
But then goes on to say
“But I am not an explorer. I haven’t got a single explorer on my planet. It’s not a geographer’s job to go and count the towns, the rivers, the mountains, the seas, the oceans, and the deserts. The geographer is not to loaf about and leave his desk. But he receives the explorers in his study. He asks them questions, and he notes down their travel impressions. And if the recollections of any one among them seem interesting to him, the geographer orders an inquiry into that explorer’s moral character”
Absurdism is the gap between the ideal and the actual. No matter what we do, we will never close the gap between the ideal and the actual. Camus described this constant feeling of absurdism using the myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus is a figure in Greek mythology. He cheats death twice and is punished by Hades in Tartarus to endlessly roll a boulder up a hill. However, right before he gets to the top, Hades make the boulder slip from his hand and roll back. This uselessness effort and unending frustration of Sisyphus is experienced by the absurd.
Faced with this uselessness and frustration, there are two solutions that an absurd could take: physical suicide or philosophical suicide. We know what physical suicide is. Eliminating one ideal is what is called philosophical suicide. The king, the geographer, and all the people that the little prince met have committed philosophical suicide.
The snake in the story is a symbol of death. In the story, the little prince has not yet experienced regret before meeting the snake. Only after meeting the snake that he experience regret. Only after being aware of death that one become aware of life. That one could regret not to live.
However, after one is aware of its life, one cannot just start to live. In the case of the little prince, however, he can’t go back to his planet because there is no way to go back in space or time. The little prince then becomes an absurd. As Camus said, in this stage the world evade us because it becomes itself again.
“For a second we cease to understand it because for centuries we have understood in it solely the images and designs that we had attributed to it beforehand, because henceforth we lack the power to make use of that artifice. The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage scenery masked by habit becomes again what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us”
Soon enough, the little prince is forced to commit either.
The little prince, facing this absurdism, is unable to commit philosophical suicide and let go of his rose. He chooses physical suicide. The little prince himself is an absurd. The little prince taught our pilot about the beauty of the stars and the dessert. He said
“You know, it will be very nice. I, too, shall look at the stars. All the stars will be wells with a rusty pulley. All the stars will pour out fresh water for me to drink . . .”
Unfortunately, he can’t live up to his word. Even after being aware of this, he still is unable to let go of his rose he chooses to see the beauty of all roses this way. The snake then bites the little prince.
Death
There are many possibilities of where little prince goes. He could be on his planet talking to his rose or he died and ceased to exist. No one knows. No one knows whether the little prince’s suicide takes him to the rose or not. Likewise, no one knows where one go if one dies. We will never know whether they are in heaven or conscious somewhere, or even cease to exist. Even using science we are unable to attain this knowledge. That is because science requires a leap of faith. That leap of faith is the truism of the senses. But this should be another topic.
What we can do is only hope. Hope that the little prince can finally meet his rose. Hope that our loved ones are in heaven. I used the word hope because belief in this sense is the same as hope.
All of these do not mean the little prince’s journey with the pilot becomes meaningless to the pilot. It’s the other way around. Just as the little prince said, because the pilot has formed a relationship with the little prince, the stars at night become special to the pilot. After the death of the little prince, the little prince story is less a story about the little prince himself, it’s more of a story about the pilot.
“The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back your memory. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat…”
If there is ever a sequel to this story, it would be about where the pilot is going to lead his own life.
References
- The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus