Tracery: The Little Prince

Hmm, I didn’t quite get as far as I wanted… [JUMP TO P5 SKETCH]

I chose to focus on the The Little Prince. A particular feature of the story that I remember is how during his journey, the little prince goes out to explore other tiny asteroids (worlds) and finds that each are inhabited by a professional adult. In doing so he is exposed to adulthood and he doesn’t take well to it.

In the original story, he encounters:

• king
• vain man
• drunkard
• businessman
• lamplighter
• geographer

I thought this might be a fun place to generate some additional storylines.

Breaking down the plot

In essence, The Little Prince fits the “hero’s journey” archetype.

If we break down the plot around the journey we can summarize it as:

• He falls in love with a rose that mysteriously sprouts on his planet.
• He is disillusioned of that love and decides to set out on a journey to nearby worlds.
• He realizes his love for the his rose and feels lonely that he is so far from his rose.
• He returns to his world, presumably with a greater sense of love for his rose.

On top of all this, there are a lot of supplementary characters that add the the hero’s journey like the snake, fox, and narrator, but I won’t detail those here.

Goodnight, sweet prince.

• Playing with corpora lists! … plants and occupations https://github.com/dariusk/corpora/blob/master/data/humans/occupations.json

On separating discourse…

Separating discourse from story is difficult. At the most, I’ve set it up to vary the order of events but goingg beyond that to manipulate things such as narrator voice and elements of style are difficult.