The Adventures of Pinocchio

Summary

In a Tuscan village the carpenter Mastro Cherry finds a log that cries out when he strikes it, and gladly hands it to his poor friend Geppetto, who carves it into a marionette and names him Pinocchio. The puppet runs off before his feet are finished, gets Geppetto taken to jail, and kills the Talking Cricket with a hammer when it warns him that disobedient boys come to grief. Hungry and alone, he burns his feet off on a foot warmer; Geppetto comes home, gives him his own three pears, carves new feet, and sells his only coat to buy him a spelling book. Pinocchio sells the book for a ticket to the puppet show. The showman Fire Eater means to burn him for firewood but sneezes with pity and sends him home with five gold pieces for his father. On the road the Fox and the Cat, pretending to be lame and blind, lure him toward the Field of Wonders, where buried coins are said to grow into trees of gold; disguised as assassins, they hang him from a great oak. The Fairy with Azure Hair rescues him, summons three doctors, and coaxes him into his medicine; when he lies, his nose grows. Robbed at last of his gold, he is jailed by a gorilla judge for being the victim. Through a long chain of episodes, as a farmer's watchdog, mourner at the Fairy's grave, worker on the Island of the Busy Bees, schoolboy fighting on the beach, and fish almost fried by the Green Fisherman, he keeps promising to be good and keeps failing. On the very eve of becoming a real boy he runs off with his idle friend Lamp-Wick to the Land of Toys, where after five months of play both turn into donkeys. Sold to a circus, lamed, and thrown into the sea to be skinned for a drum, Pinocchio is freed by fishes and swallowed by the Terrible Shark, inside which he finds Geppetto, who has lived there two years by candlelight. He carries his father out on his back, is helped ashore by a Tunny, and for months draws water and weaves baskets to buy milk for the old man, studying at night. When he gives his savings for a new suit to the Fairy, who is ill and poor, he wakes to find himself a real boy and Geppetto restored. Collodi published the story in instalments in the children's weekly Giornale per i bambini from July 1881 to January 1883; it appeared as a book in February 1883, published in Florence by Felice Paggi with drawings by Enrico Mazzanti. The library text is Carol Della Chiesa's 1926 English translation.

Top Lessons

• Promises are kept in deeds, not in good feelings

  Pinocchio repeatedly weeps, resolves to be good, and runs off again the same day, as when he sells the spelling book Geppetto bought with his coat. Only in the last chapter, when he draws a hundred buckets of water every morning for his father's milk, does a resolution become a habit. Collodi shows that a changed heart is proved by steady work over months.

• Easy riches and easy pleasures are traps

  The Field of Wonders promises two thousand gold pieces for burying four, and the Land of Toys promises a year of Saturdays. Both are offered by smiling strangers, and both end with Pinocchio poorer and worse off: jailed for being robbed, and turned into a donkey for doing nothing but play.

• A father's love goes ahead of the son's repentance

  Geppetto forgives Pinocchio for his first escape before he asks, gives him his breakfast, sells his coat in winter, and later sets out to sea to find him. When Pinocchio finds him inside the Shark, the old man asks only whether this is really his own dear boy. The book's happiest scene is a reunion of father and son.

• Lies grow and good advice is often unwelcome

  Pinocchio's nose grows with each lie until he cannot turn around in the room, and the Fairy tells him that lies are easy to spot. The Talking Cricket is right about everything and is killed for saying so, yet his warnings follow Pinocchio until the end.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Pinocchio is a comic book, but medicine and hunger run through it. The consultation of the Crow, the Owl, and the Talking Cricket in Chapter 16 belongs to the old satirical tradition, familiar from Molière, of learned physicians who contradict each other with confident nonsense: one pronounces the patient dead unless he is alive, the other alive unless he is dead. Chapter 17 is a small fable of medication refusal, in which a child bargains for sugar, refuses the bitter draught, and complies only when the undertakers arrive. Hunger is the book's constant background in a poor Tuscan household: Pinocchio burns his feet asleep by the fire after a failed attempt at an omelet, Geppetto gives up his three pears, and the donkey Lamp-Wick dies worn out from hunger and work. The book also contains feigned disability (the Fox's pretended lameness and the Cat's pretended blindness, the Cat's blindness becoming real in the last chapter), the comic donkey fever diagnosed by a Dormouse who takes the pulse, and a son's months of caregiving for a weak old father restored by daily milk. These are moral and comic devices, not clinical observations, and should be read as such.

• Chapter 16

  The Fairy calls three doctors, a Crow, an Owl, and the Talking Cricket, to decide whether the hanged puppet is alive; the first two give circular verdicts and the Cricket answers with a moral diagnosis instead.

• Chapter 17

  Feverish Pinocchio refuses his bitter medicine until four black rabbits bring a coffin for him; he swallows it and recovers at once.

• Chapters 5-7

  Alone and starving, Pinocchio searches the house for food, falls asleep with his feet on the foot warmer, and wakes with them burned off; Geppetto feeds him his own pears.

• Chapters 12 and 36

  The Fox and the Cat feign lameness and blindness to win sympathy; at the end the Cat has truly lost his sight and the starving Fox has sold his own tail for food.

• Chapter 32

  A Dormouse feels Pinocchio's pulse and diagnoses the donkey fever that turns lazy boys into donkeys.

• Chapter 36

  Pinocchio draws water each dawn to earn milk for his weak father, builds him a wheeled chair, and finds his friend Lamp-Wick dying as an overworked donkey.