Remembering the Deceased Friend

The Interpretation of Death in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince

Abstract

Starting from The Little Prince, I will undertake a phenomenological analysis of death. Death is only revealed to us within a narrative context that has a love relationship, in this case friendship, at its centre. The finitude of human life is presented as the background of a meaningful life in which encounter and friendship with the other, and devotional love, are possible at all. Secondly, I will examine the meaning of death as an event. In The Little Prince, the narrator suggests that the two fundamental qualities of human existence are loneliness and rootlessness. Death as an event has a radically different meaning for the rootless and homeless, the lonely 'grown-ups', and for those who, recognising its inner orientation, live a meaningful life. While for the former, death is an irresistible destructive force already in life, for the latter, death is inseparable from life and is a constitutive part of it as a meaningful whole. Thirdly, death manifests itself as a mystery of life that can only be revealed in retrospect. The disturbing memory of a departed friend is also rich and hopeful, if approached through a memory the ultimate function of which is conversion by inspiring a radical reassessment of the whole of life through the new meaning of memory of the other. True friendship has a consoling character for the dead friend can even be more intensely, more clearly present in our lives, if we follow the existential truth revealed in the memory of his devoted love.