The Little Prince is about two castaways lost in a section of the Sahara desert. The narrator is a pilot who has crashed his plane, and I should note that Saint-Exupery, an ace pilot himself, crashed a few times, including into a ditch in the Libyan Desert. In 1944, while serving in the French Air Force during WWII, he took off from the island of Corsica and was never seen alive again. The book's other castaway is its titular hero: The Little Prince is an explorer from a very small meteorite who abandoned his tiny rocky home because of his complicated relationship with...a rose. Yes, I said a rose. All of this is perfectly sensible within the reality of this lighthearted allegorical fantasy. The rose is beautiful but tricky, by turns beguiling and manipulative, yet altogether well intentioned. The Little Prince is alternately smitten by and frustrated by it, and the dissonance is too much for him to reconcile; he wants to run away from it. Not a bad metaphor for the relationship between Lost and its viewers. Or is that ex-viewers?
Lost name-checks book titles for any number of reasons. This column has often treated these citations as clues to Island mysteries or plot direction, but in truth, my default thinking in regard to all of the show's literary references is that the show is either having fun with us or calling out inspirations or embellishing its own themes by linking to thematically similar works. But sometimes they do serve as signposts that point to where the Lost saga is headed. The classic example — corroborated by the producers — was An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce in season 2. If you recall, Locke found this book in the Hatch. Thematically, this twist-ending tale was a perfect reference for a season that was full of what English professors like to call ''unreliable narrators'': the orientation films, Henry Gale/Benjamin Linus, Sawyer the Con Man, Michael the Traitor. More to the point, Owl Creek Bridge was intended to wink at fan theorists who believed in the ''It's all a dream'' argument, and to foreshadow an episode that was designed to debunk said theory: ''Dave,'' the Hurley-flashback story that introduced us to his bad-influence imaginary friend and ended with the infamous Libby was a patient at Hurley's mental hospital reveal.
NEXT PAGE: Why the Doc senses a strong whiff of Jack coming off the Little Prince
