Of the three works of Saint-Exupery considered, Night Flight is the only work that has the characteristics of a true novel, although its brevity puts it rather in the category of a novella.

Saint-Exupery had originally submitted four hundred pages to Gallimard, these were reduced to one hundred fifty. In this way the story gained in rigor and precision, yet lost much of the poetry that was Saint-Exupery's forte. Night Flight, however, has been called "a work which gets as close as it can to a poem stretched out into a book of prose." Curtis Cate calls it, "a treatise on leadership written in the form of a novel in the language of a poet."

In addition to the poetic descriptions of the night, of the impending cyclone that was to cause Fabien's disappearance and of the philosophical implications of the text, Saint-Exupery also makes use of dramatic...