“But I know that he did go back to his planet, because I did not find his body at daybreak.” (27.2) The narrator initially thinks the prince has died after the snake bites him, but ends up changing his mind: However, we see that the snake turns out to be true to his word. He is afraid and nervous when the time comes for the snake to bite him. At that point, it seems like the prince, too, doesn’t quite trust the snake. When he decides to return home, the prince does take up the snake’s offer to provide him with a transportation service. But in this case, whence the little prince came is actually Asteroid B-612, so the bite will take him back there. The whole “whence they came” relates to the “ashes to ashes” idea-that human beings are made of dust, and that they will return to dust when they die. The snake bites people and sends them “whence they came” (17.25), remember? That means people die when he bites them. This could, of course, be just a simple play on words.
And somehow, if the little prince wants to go home to his planet, he can hitch a ride on the snake’s bite. Ok, so it’s clear the snake can instantly kill whomever it bites. He asks the snake, “But why do you always speak in riddles?” (17.28), to which the snake responds with another indirect answer: “I solve them all” (17.29). He says, “I can take you farther than any ship could take you” (17.23).Īll this sounds very mysterious and puzzling, right? We think so, and so does the little prince. So why doesn’t he strike the prince? The snake explains that the prince moves him to pity because he is “so weak on this Earth made of granite” (17.27) but the snake offers to help the prince get to his planet if he someday grows too homesick. ‘Whomever I touch, I send back to the earth from whence he came,’ the snake spoke again. …e twined himself around the little prince’s ankle, like a golden bracelet. The prince tells him that he is “a funny animal, no thicker than a finger” (17.19), and the snake counters by saying, “But I am more powerful than the finger of a king” (17.20).
Slowly, though, the snake does turn sinister. A Tighter Breathing, and Zero at the Bone When the prince remarks, “It is a little lonely in the desert…” (17.16), the snake replies that it “is also lonely among men” (17.17). Nothing overtly evil about the snake as yet-in fact, he seems to be quite a chatty fellow, and wise, too. And when the prince points to the sky, to his own planet, the snake remarks that it is “beautiful” (17.12). It’s the snake who tells the prince, “This is the Earth this is Africa” (17.7) when the prince wants to know which planet he is on. And the snake, too, seems to treat the prince with respect. He isn’t afraid of it, and converses with it as if it were just another one of the creatures he meets on his travels. He doesn’t want it anywhere near the prince.īut the prince sees the snake differently. In The Little Prince, the narrator certainly doesn’t trust the snake. Is it possible to come across any snake in literature and not think of that snake? You know, the one in the Bible and Paradise Lost-the one that’s actually Satan.įrom all of this, it’s hard to know when, in literature, you can or should trust a snake.