Abstract
‘The Little Prince’ is a complex re-presentation of life in the form of an allegory. The 20th century French author, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, keeps its narrative simple at the surface level but the journey of the Prince has two terrains: through his visits of the small planets, he experiences life at micro level while his visit of the planet Earth shows his encounter with life at macro level. This paper explores how the little prince witnesses human traits that include virtues as well as idiosyncrasies following the clichés and paradoxes of human world. In this context, it would be relevant to mention Muhammad Iqbal, the early 20th century poet philosopher of the Indian sub-continent, portrays the modern world and its issues while unraveling his spectrum of life through poetic pearls of his wisdom. This paper also studies how the author uses innocence - the special trait of the prince, in reasoning and unfolding the idiosyncrasies; that how the prince, through the magnifying glass of maturity, perceives the immaturity of people, committing follies in their own make-belief worlds of knowledge, power, research and abstract realities. It also reflects upon the people’s belief that they own the whole world of their specific planet while they lack the essence with which the little Prince is gifted. This paper will also focus upon how the author delineates the narrative with the nuances of human life and re-presents life as a literary musical orchestration of Opera, embedding the ‘little’ life in the macro framework of Earth, and thus constituting the opera of life echoing with the global politics of power and imperialism, lust, arrogance and conceitedness, and as in Coetzee’s perspective, ‘what is wrong with today’s world, the more contentious the better’.
Keyword(s)
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