Two drawings in Antoine de Saint Exupery's The Little Prince put forth the fundamental problem of comprehension with the respect to the medium of drawing. The first drawing, which the narrator produced as a child, actually represents a boa constrictor that has swallowed an elephant whole and is mistaken for a hat by all the adults to whom it is shown. (Figure 1.) Frustrated by the adults' persistent misreading, the narrator produced a second drawing, which clearly shows the elephant inside. To his chagrin, the adults were still baffled by the rudimentary section, which convinced him to abandon drawing and what, he later lamented, might have been a “magnificent career as a painter.”
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