THE LITTLE PRINCE

Author: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Year: 1952 (1943)
Publisher: Rabén & Sjögren
Language: Swedish (translator Gunvor Bang)

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “Lille prinsen” (“The Little Prince”) is often, correctly or not, classified as a children’s book, a categorisation that itself reproduces one of the central faults the text quietly dismantles: the adult tendency to sort meaning into rigid taxonomies that obscure lived experience. Beneath its deceptively simple narrative lies a potent ethnography of adulthood, observed through the eyes of a child positioned as The Other within the dominant social order of grown-ups.

The main character, in social anthropological sense, functions as an etic observer. He moves between worlds, asteroids, deserts, and human institutions, and interacts with their respective societies without fully belonging to any of them. In the adult world, he is systematically misconstrued. Adults interpret through institutionalised parameters: numbers, ownership, rank, productivity. The child, by contrast, operates with relational epistemologies: care, curiosity, attachment, and presence. This mismatch renders the child an outsider, not because of juniority, but because of incompatibility.

The grown-ups Saint-Exupéry depicts are not individualised characters so much as social types. The king, the businessman, the geographer, and the lamp lighter are caricatures of actors captured in their roles. These are all people who have mistaken symbolic systems for reality itself and whose identities have consequently collapsed into their functions. Their lives are governed by what I call “self-imposed futility”: activities sustained not because they generate meaning, but because they reproduce the illusion of purpose. The businessman counts stars he can never use; the geographer records landscapes he has never seen.

Self-imposed futility resembles what Sartre called “mauvaise foi” or “bad faith”, but while self-imposed futility proposes to name a collective condition in which people inhabit empty roles sustained by social norms rather than lived meaning, mauvaise foi is the individual’s conscious self-deception that denies personal freedom by mistaking role for destiny. Both diagnose role capture, but Sartre moralises it whereas Saint-Exupéry anthropologises it, as it were.

Another concept akin to self-imposed futility is the Marxist notion of “estrangement” which describes how people can become disconnected from the fruit of their labour, and by extension from their context in society, which may lead to apathy and nihilism. However, in the most basic Marxist understanding this alienation is experienced, whereas self-imposed futility, I submit, encapsulates the continuous illusion of meaning into a state of the subconscious.  

What makes “Lille Prinsen” remarkable is that it, kills two birds with one stone, without announcing its didacticism. First, it reassures the child reader that they do not need to understand, or envy for that matter, the adult world. The book subtly delegitimises adult norms by revealing their arbitrariness. Children that are used to hearing “you will understand when you grow older” may find this refreshingly liberating as it legitimises not only their childhood, but also their worldview. Childhood here is not a preparatory stage but a fully realised cultural environment with its own logic and value system.

Second, the book offers grown-ups a mirror that is gentle but unsparing. By adopting the child’s point of view, Saint-Exupéry uncloaks adult practices, making them visible as odd, ritualised, and absurd. This is a classic ethnographic manoeuvre, externalising the familiar allowing for outside scrutiny. The result is an invitation for adults to recognise the arbitrariness of their life choices and the ways they have normalised nonsense in the name of seriousness. In Millennial vernacular: adulting.

Crucially, the text resists nostalgia. It does not argue that children are purer or morally superior. Instead, it suggests that adulthood often involves a narrowing of perception, a loss of interpretive plurality. The tragedy is not growing up per se, but forgetting that other ways of being remain possible. The little prince does not reject adulthood. He simply refuses to normalise it. Being an adult, he teaches us, does not have to follow a pattern. We could choose to break the routine, but we have grown blind to that option. And even if we saw it, having forgotten what it is like to be a child, we would no longer grasp the value of it. We are victims of self-imposed futility.

In the end, “Lille Prinsen” endures because it operates simultaneously as a fable, a philosophical critique, and a soft ethnography of modern life. It speaks to children without condescension and to adults without accusation. By positioning the child as The Other, Saint-Exupéry exposes how adulthood, far from being an inevitable norm, is itself a culturally specific, and perhaps questionable, way of organising existence.