The Prophet

Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, published in 1923, is a slim book of twenty-six poetic prose chapters framed as a single extended scene. The protagonist, Almustafa, has lived twelve years in the city of Orphalese and is preparing to board a ship bound for his native isle. Before departure, a seeress named Almitra and a crowd of townspeople stop him and ask him to speak on the matters of their lives. What follows is not narrative but a sequence of sermons, each addressing one subject. He discourses on love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, houses, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion, and death. Almitra herself requests the closing words on death, after which Almustafa takes leave, promises in the next chapter to return, and the book ends with a chapter titled The Farewell. The work’s distinctive framework is the farewell address as scaffold: a departing sage answers questions posed by ordinary citizens, so each chapter is a short meditation rather than an argument. Gibran’s aphoristic style delivered the book wide popularity in the twentieth century, particularly in the United States, where it has remained continuously in print. Readers looking for plot, named antagonists, or research will not find them here; the book offers allegorical instruction voiced by one speaker in a fixed setting. Its best-known chapters include On Children, On Work, and On Love, frequently quoted at weddings and funerals.