The Implied Reader in The Little Prince

The Little Prince (1943), the most famous novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, is among the best-selling books published. The present study is trying to investigate the implied reader in The Little Prince. To this end, based on Aidan Chambers’s five principal techniques in determining the concept of the Implied Reader , the novella will be analyzed. These elements consist of point of view, style, intermission, tell-tale gaps, and taking sides. There has been much study on the novella, but since no academic study has yet focused on the implied reader, the author of this study hopes that the results would help scholars to focus more on the significance of the reception studies in children's literature. The results reveal that although the application of some of the techniques presented by Chambers prove that children are among the audience, the dominant style containing imageries, symbols, and themes and also the resolution of tell-tale gaps are the means by which the true audience is revealed. As the conclusion, it is manifested that adults (or as Saint-Exupery calls them the grown-ups) are the implied readers of this novella.

Keywords:

Implied Reader , Aidan Chambers , The Little Prince , Reader-Response Theory , Antoine de Saint-Exupery