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To know more about The little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

  • The Businessman who is constantly busy counting the stars he thinks he owns. He wishes to use them to buy more stars. The prince then goes on to define property. The prince owns the flower and volcanoes on his planet because he cares for them and they care for him, but because one cannot maintain the stars or be of use to them, he argues, the Businessman cannot own them.
  • The Lamplighter who lives on an asteroid which rotates once a minute. Long ago, he was charged with the task of lighting the lamp at night and extinguishing it in the morning. At that point, the asteroid revolved at a reasonable rate, and he had time to rest. As time went on, the rotation sped up. Refusing to turn his back on his work, he now lights and extinguishes the lamp once a minute, getting no rest. The prince empathizes with the Lamplighter, who is the only adult he meets to care about something other than himself.
  • The Geographer who spends all of his time making maps, but never leaves his desk to examine anywhere (even his own planet), considering that is the job of an explorer. The Geographer is in any case very doubting of any explorer's character and would most likely disregard the report. He does not trust things he has not seen with his own eyes, yet will not leave his desk. Out of professional interest, the geographer asks the prince to describe his asteroid. The prince describes the volcanoes and the rose. "We don't record flowers", says the geographer, "because they are only ephemeral". The prince is shocked and hurt to learn that his flower will someday be gone. The geographer then recommends that he visit the Earth.

Chapter 16 begins: "So then the seventh planet was the Earth". On the Earth, he starts out in the desert and meets a snake that claims to have the power to return him to his home planet (A clever way to say that he can kill people, thus "Sending anyone he wishes back to the land from whence he came.") The prince meets a desert-flower, who, having seen a caravan pass by, tells him that there are only a handful of men on Earth and that they have no roots, which lets the wind blow them around making life hard on them. The little prince climbs the highest mountain he has ever seen. From the top of the mountain, he hopes he will see the whole planet and find people, but he sees only a desolate, craggy landscape. When the prince calls out, his echo answers him, and he mistakes it for the voices of humans. He thinks Earth is unnecessarily sharp and hard, and he finds it odd that the people of Earth only repeat what he says to them.

Eventually, the prince comes upon a whole row of rosebushes, and is downcast because he thought that his rose was the only one in the whole universe. He begins to feel that he is not a great prince at all, as his planet contains only three tiny volcanoes and a flower he now thinks of as common. He lies down in the grass and weeps.

Chapter 21: is the author's statement about human love in that the prince then meets and tames a fox, who explains to the prince that his rose is unique and special, because she is the one that he loves. He also explains that in a way he has tamed the flower, as it has tamed him, and that this is why he now feels responsible for it.

Chapter 22–23: The prince then meets a railway switchman and a merchant who provide further comments on the ridiculousness and absurdity of much of the human condition. The switchman tells the prince how passengers constantly rush from one place to another aboard trains, never satisfied with where they are and not knowing what they are after, only the children amongst them bothering to look out of the windows. The merchant tells the prince about his product, a pill which eliminates thirst and is therefore very popular, saving people fifty-three minutes a week; the prince replies that he would use the time to walk and find fresh water.

Chapter 24: the narrator's point of view changes again from third person to first person. The narrator is dying of thirst, but then he and the prince find a well. After some thought, the prince bids an emotional farewell to the narrator, explaining to him that while it will look as though he has died, he has not, but rather that his body is too heavy to take with him to his planet. He tells the narrator that it was wrong of the narrator to come and watch, as it will make him sad. The prince allows the snake to bite him and the next morning, when the narrator looks for the prince, he finds the boy's body has disappeared. The story ends with a portrait of the landscape where the meeting of the prince and the narrator took place and where the snake took the prince's life. The picture is deliberately vague but the narrator also makes a plea that anyone encountering a strange child in that area who refuses to answer questions should contact the narrator immediately.

The little prince is represented as having been on Earth for one year, and the narrator ends the story six years after he is rescued from the desert.