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Bernard Montoneri, National Cheng Kung University, TaiwanAbstract
Saint-Exupéry’s celebrated novella The Little Prince contrasts the irrationality and absurdity of adults with the imagination, creativity, and sense of wonder in children. Before leaving America in 1943, Saint-Exupéry gave the 30,000-word manuscript of his philosophical story to American journalist Silvia Hamilton, who sold it to the Morgan Library and Museum in New York in 1968. Saint-Exupéry removed many sentences and paragraphs before submitting his work to his American publishers, Reynal & Hitchcock. The published version is only half the size of the manuscript held at the Morgan Library. This paper examines Folio 94, a lesser-known manuscript folio, available on the Morgan Library website and in Cerisier and Lacroix (2013), where the Little Prince visits a store selling an absurd instrument that mimics the sound of a small earthquake; the merchant is surprised and upset when the prince says he is not interested and asks the young customer to go home and read a manual of slogans hoping to change his mind. The article argues that Folio 94 functions like an argumentative mini-play that criticizes consumerism, conformity, and the absurdities of capitalism; it portrays the Little Prince as a poetic figure of revolt and resistance, closely tied to Albert Camus’s absurdist philosophy and Marxist literary criticism.
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Conference: KAMC2025Stream: Literature
This paper is part of the KAMC2025 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Montoneri B. (2026) Absurdism and Consumerism in the Morgan Library Manuscript of The Little Prince ISSN: 2436-0503 – The Kyoto Conference on Arts, Media & Culture 2025: Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 851-862) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2436-0503.2025.68
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2436-0503.2025.68
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