Quote 13
The first night, then, I went to sleep on the sand, a thousand miles from any human habitation. I was more isolated than a shipwrecked sailor on a raft in the middle of the ocean. Thus you can imagine my amazement, at sunrise, when I was awakened by an odd little voice. (2.2)
When the narrator first crashes in the desert, he expects to be there alone. It’s kind of funny, isn’t it, that he compares himself—someone stuck in the middle of a desert—to someone stuck in the middle of a huge body of water? It’s as though anything from the natural world that’s expansive, whether it’s sand or water, treats small, helpless people in the same way.
Quote 14
“For the sunset. We must wait until it is time.”
At first you seemed to be very much surprised. And then you laughed to yourself. You said to me:
“I am always thinking that I am at home!” (6.5-7)
In the prince’s version of how things are, it’s normal to see a sunset when you want to—you just have to scoot your chair over to the section of your tiny planet on which the sun is setting. But in our reality, things work differently, which the prince finds strange.
Quote 15
So he cleaned out the extinct volcano, too. If they are well cleaned out, volcanoes burn slowly and steadily, without any eruptions. Volcanic eruptions are like fires in a chimney.
On our earth we are obviously much too small to clean out our volcanoes. That is why they bring no end of trouble upon us. (9.1-2)
Sounds so logical, doesn’t it? We almost believe it. Almost. Clearly, our narrator’s version of reality is also just a tiny bit warped. Don’t try to sweep out a volcano! You’d set your pants on fire.