| Summary: | 碩士 === 靜宜大學 === 英國語文學系研究所 === 91 === Thesis Titile: A Semiotic Study of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince: The Immortal Childhood.
The Graduate Program of the Department of English Languages, Literature and Linguistics, Providence University 91st School Year
An Abstract of a Thesis for the Degree Master of Arts
Graduate: Patrick I-Feng Chen
Advisor: Dr. Patricia Haseltine
Abstract
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince has been attractive to readers since its first edition in 1943. It has been translated into at least fifty languages and is the third most read book in the world. It readers include children and adults. Saint-Exupéry, in this most popular masterpiece, creates a fascinating figure—the little prince, who, as a prince, is a completely reverse figure. Compared with the role of the prince in the traditional fairy tales of Grimm and Perrault, the little prince obviously lacks the defining qualities such as nobility, power, and wealth; in contrast, the little prince seems to represent something more spiritual. This thesis applies Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of semiotics to fathom the significance of The Little Prince and finally explains how the little prince becomes symbolic of an immortal child, who can live in anyone’s heart.
This thesis is divided into five chapters. In Chapter I, the philosophical view of Wordsworth’s idea about the child inside an adult is first discussed. Saint-Exupéry also holds the romanticist idea, but he mixes it with the modernistic writing skill. The mixture of romanticism and modernism is also found in Gaston Bachelard. In this chapter, basic Peircian semiotics is introduced. In Chapter II, the main purpose is to show that the “prince” sign in The Little Prince is different from that in traditional fairy tales. By negating the signs for development formed in Bettelheim’s psychological analyses of fairy tales, the new “prince” sign is that the little prince is an innocent image who can see the essence of things. Besides, several figures related to the little prince are also discussed; in a semiotic stud, they also bear new significances. In Chapter III, the discussion focuses on the symbolic meanings of different places (space) in The Little Prince. Modernistic ways of analysis such as minimalism and defamilirization are used to show how home, the forest, and the otherworld produce meanings in contrast to the conventional ones. In Chapter IV, the semiotic idea and possibility of an immortal child inside an adult is fully elaborated through a discussion of time representations or their absence. Chapter V remarks the value of the semiotic findings. Not only does the little prince represent timelessness, the book controverts conventions of time and space.
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