Unlike most novels assigned in schools, The Little Prince was illustrated by its own author, and those illustrations are not decorative extras but integral parts of how the story communicates meaning. The opening drawing of the boa constrictor, mistaken by adults for a hat, only makes full sense when the reader can see both the child's drawing and the adult's misreading side by side, which makes visual literacy a genuine part of understanding this text.

A visual literacy assignment asks students to analyze a specific illustration the same way they would analyze a passage of text, considering composition, color, and detail as deliberate choices that convey meaning. The prince's own illustration, small and often drawn against a vast, empty background, reinforces the book's themes of isolation and scale in a way that would be harder to convey through prose alone.

Some editions of the book are printed without the original illustrations, and it is worth confirming which edition a class is using before building a visual literacy unit around them, since the assignment depends entirely on students having access to Saint-Exupéry's original artwork rather than a text-only edition or an edition with different illustrations.

This kind of assignment also works well for students who are strong visual thinkers but less confident with purely textual analysis, giving them another entry point into demonstrating literary understanding that draws on a different set of interpretive skills.

Structuring the Visual Analysis Assignment

A basic visual analysis structure asks students to describe the illustration's key visual elements first, then interpret what those elements suggest about the accompanying text, and finally connect that interpretation to a broader theme in the novel. This mirrors the structure of a strong textual quote analysis, just applied to an image instead of a passage.

• Analyze the boa constrictor illustration and its role in the opening chapters
• Analyze the illustration of the prince standing alone on his tiny planet
• Analyze the illustration of the rose under her glass globe
• Analyze the illustration of the fox and what its posture suggests about the relationship
• Analyze the final illustration of the desert landscape where the prince disappears

Connecting Image and Text

The strongest visual analysis essays draw explicit connections between what an illustration shows and what the surrounding text says, noting places where the two reinforce each other and places where the illustration adds something the words alone do not convey. Encouraging students to look for this kind of gap or reinforcement between image and text produces more sophisticated analysis than simply describing what is pictured.

For instance, the illustration of the prince on his impossibly small planet visually reinforces the theme of scale and isolation that the text discusses more abstractly, and an essay that notices this reinforcement is doing genuinely strong multimodal literary analysis.

Grading Visual Analysis Work

Grading criteria for this kind of assignment should mirror a standard essay rubric, focused on specific evidence, this time visual rather than textual, and depth of interpretation, rather than inventing an entirely separate grading framework. This consistency helps students see visual analysis as a genuine extension of the literary analysis skills they are already building, not a separate, lesser category of assignment.

It is worth explicitly telling students that describing what is pictured is not the same as analyzing it, since this is the most common gap between weak and strong visual analysis responses, exactly parallel to the gap between summary and analysis in a traditional textual essay.

Extending Into Student Illustration

A natural extension of this unit asks students to create their own illustration for a scene in the book, along with a written explanation of the artistic choices they made and how those choices reflect their interpretation of the text. This kind of assignment works well as a creative alternative or supplement to a purely written response, and can be graded using a similar rubric to the creative writing assignments discussed elsewhere in a Little Prince unit.

Displaying student illustrations alongside brief written explanations, whether physically in a classroom or digitally, also gives the unit a visible, shareable output that many students find motivating in a way that a purely written essay does not always achieve.