Pinocchio
Carlo Collodi

INTRODUCTION
PRINCIPAL WORKS
GENERAL COMMENTARY
FURTHER READING

(Born Carlo Lorenzini) Italian translator and author of fairy tales, juvenile fiction, and textbooks.

The following entry presents criticism on Collodi's juvenile novel Le Avventure di Pinocchio: La storia di un burattino (1883; The Adventures of Pinocchio: The Story of a Marionette) through 1999. For further information on Collodi's life and works, see CLR, Volume 5.

INTRODUCTION

Since its original serialized publication in the Italian juvenile magazine Giornale per i bambini, Le Avventure di Pinocchio: La storia di un burattino (1883; The Adventures of Pinocchio: The Story of a Marionette) has emerged as one of the most iconic works of children's literature of all time. However, Collodi's original tale of a marionette child brought to life is significantly different from the Americanized version of Pinocchio that was made famous by the 1940 Walt Disney animated feature. Far darker and replete with recurring themes of metamorphosis, personal evolution, and the nature of good and evil, Collodi's Pinocchio is held as one of Italy's literary national treasures, with Nicolas J. Perella arguing that, "no other work of Italian literature can be said to approach the popularity Pinocchio enjoys beyond Italy's linguistic frontiers." Historically, The Adventures of Pinocchio marked a turning point in Italian children's literature, moving juvenile narratives of the period away from overt didacticism and more toward the use of comedy and minimal adult intrusion. The subject of a two-year long celebration in Italy honoring the centennial of its first publication, Pinocchio has become an icon of modern popular culture, inspiring merchandising, stage plays, motion pictures, and hundreds of new editions of the classic tale, making Collodi's titular puppet one of the most reprinted characters in the pantheon of children's literature.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Carlo Lorenzini was born in Florence, Italy, on November 24, 1826; he later adopted the pseudonym "Carlo Collodi", borrowing his nom de plume from

the village of Collodi near Pescia in Tuscany where his mother was born. Collodi was the eldest of ten children, though seven of his siblings died very early in life. His parents, Domenico Lorenzini and Angela Orzali, were domestic servants to Marquis Lorenzo Ginori Lisci. Recognizing Collodi's intelligence, the Marquis's wife, the Marchesa Ginori, took an interest in the boy at a young age and assisted him in enrolling in a well-regarded seminary. The precocious Collodi left the seminary at the age of sixteen and enrolled at the College of the Scolopi Fathers where he studied rhetoric and philosophy. In 1848 he enlisted to fight for Tuscany in the First Italian War of Independence. After the war, Collodi returned to Tuscany as a journalist where he founded Il Lampiore, a satirical political newspaper which was closed by the ruling Grand Duchy in 1849. Still fervently interested in politics, Collodi launched two more newspapers and began composing works of literary criti- cism, novels, and stage plays. His works from this era include Gli amici di casa, a comedy in three acts performed at the Teatro Nuovo in 1856, and a novel, Un romanzo in vapore (1856). In 1859 he returned to the frontlines of Italy's Second War of Independence as a volunteer. After assisting in the liberation of Northern and Central Italy from Austrian rule, Collodi returned to Tuscany, finding work as the editor of a dictionary and as a theater censor and bureaucrat for the regional government. However, by the 1870s, Collodi was struggling under the weight of growing gambling debts. His friend, publisher Felice Paggi, had recognized the growing demand for educational texts throughout Italy and asked Collodi to write a new work based upon Alessandro Luigi Parravicini's noted textbook Giannetto. Collodi released his adaptation, Giannettino, in 1876, which came one year after Collodi's first venture into children's literature, an Italian translation of fairy tales by Charles Perrault, Countess d'Aulnoy, and Leprince de Beaumont titled I racconti delle fate (1875). After composing several more works in the "Giannettino" series, Collodi began publishing a serialized children's story in Giornale per i bambini in July 1881 about a wooden puppet magically brought to life. Originally titled La storia di un burattino (The Story of a Marionette), the tale was only fifteen chapters long and concluded with the puppet hero Pinocchio hanging dead from an oak tree. Pinocchio's death was not received well by the story's growing fan base and, as a response, Collodi resurrected his hero in February 1882 and re-titled the tale Le Avventure di Pinocchio (The Adventures of Pinocchio). Pinocchio's adventures subsequently continued for another twenty-one chapters, and the whole narrative was first collected in one volume in 1883. Pinocchio became an unprecedented international sensation and, although Collodi published another children's tale in 1907—Beppo; or, The Little Rose-Colored Monkey—his literary legacy is almost entirely tied to his story of a puppet transforming into a real boy. Collodi died on October 26, 1890, in his hometown of Florence. To this day, there are numerous monuments and references to Collodi and Pinocchio throughout the nation of Italy.

PLOT AND MAJOR CHARACTERS

Born of the Commedia dell'Arte and picaresque traditions in Italian literature, Pinocchio is the tale of a wooden puppet brought to life, his familial group of spiritual tutors, and a rogue's gallery of villains who seek to tempt young Pinocchio away from the path of personal positive transformation. A marionette much in the satirical mold of Punch and Judy, Pinocchio, in the words of David L. Russell, "is the archetypal ‘bad boy’—heir to the self-centered, antisocial picaro and the exasperating Punchinello." Even as his father/creator Geppetto carves the figure of Pinocchio from wood, the future marionette is uncontrollable and full of angry fire, with a baleful look in his eye. But, while the puppet boy initially seems irredeemable, the story charts his progress from a spiteful, animated "thing" to a loving child, a process Collodi describes by invoking the Spanish picaresque tradition of a lovable rogue of low social standing who lives in an immoral world of danger, yet manages to survive nonetheless. Incorporating aspects of puppet shows and biblical literature—two popular cultural outlets of his era—Collodi created a contemporized fairy tale which follows the spiritual progression of the complexly childlike Pinocchio. In the text, Pinocchio is carved from a block of wood, emerging as a boy in appearance only, without the soul of a real child. At first, he lacks a conscience and demonstrates no regard for anything other than himself. After quickly getting Geppetto arrested for "puppet abuse," he kills the one-hundred-year-old Talking Cricket who tries to advise him—a character re-imagined as the lovable Jiminy Cricket in the Walt Disney cartoon.

Pinocchio's disposition changes, however, after a frightening encounter in which his feet are burned off. Geppetto lovingly repairs his puppet's legs and, as a result, Pinocchio grows to love his elderly creator. Much of the rest of the narrative concerns Pinocchio's repeated attempts to overcome his own faults and resist temptation, trials he inevitably fails despite his growing desire to mend his ways. Assisted by the magic of the shape-changing Blue Fairy, who serves as a maternal figure for the motherless puppet, Pinocchio is also mentored by the sage counsel of the Talking Cricket—who returns as a ghostly spirit—and his fatherly creator Geppetto, who repeatedly sacrifices for his wooden child. Over the course of the narrative, Pinocchio is repeatedly led astray by the likes of the Fox and Cat, who swindle him with their "Field of Miracles"; the complicated puppet-master Fire-Eater (altered into the wicked Stromboli by Disney); and the lost boy Candlewick who leads Pinocchio to the land of Cocagne and inevitably into the hands of the Coachman, whom Perella calls "so much the most sinister character in the book, the real candidate for the role of the Devil." The Coachman transforms Pinocchio into a donkey after the puppet spends five months in the hedonistic Cocagne, but he is eventually returned to his puppet form, where, fully reformed, he learns to adopt a life of sacrifice for the sake of his impoverished creator. Working the same chores as a farm animal in the garden of Giangio, Pinocchio passes his final moral test and is rewarded with the body and soul of a real boy.

MAJOR THEMES

Despite the relative brevity of Pinocchio, a number of charged thematic elements run throughout the story. Perhaps most prominent is the recurrent imagery of transformation, both physical and spiritual. Stelio Cro characterizes Pinocchio as the boiling down of two primal metamorphic elements—conversion and conscience—which he argues are composed of moral, religious, spiritual, and physical aspects. On the surface, Pinocchio is transformed repeatedly. Initially a block of wood, over the course of the story, he is changed into a donkey as the result of his laziness, a state from which he is rescued when the dog-fish eat away his flesh to once again reveal his wooden self. Later, he is transformed again from wood into flesh and blood. In terms of character, Pinocchio is a boy in moral flux, torn between his desire for goodness and the pleasurable temptations of carefree fun, shifting from obedient schoolboy to useless layabout on Cocagne. Perella has asserted that, "it is not Pinocchio's social status that changes. The puppet's transformation is the result of his unalterable acceptance of a rigid work ethic within a social structure that goes unquestioned." Further, Collodi injects the subtext that Pinocchio matures from boy to man, a unique distinction from other comparative fairy tales. Thomas J. Morrissey and Richard Wunderlich characterize Collodi's portrayal of childhood as "a state of proto-adulthood … It is central to his concept that children have the same emotions, needs, and, to some extent, responsibilities, as their parents. They are not fragile ornaments to be sheltered but rather adults-in-becoming who must face, with parental guidance, the trials of the world so they can function in it as responsible adults. Collodi does not show us Pinocchio as an adult, but he does, through epic symbolism, show us his potential to become one." Given its target audience and the optimistic modifications that Walt Disney made to its storyline, Collodi's original text of Pinocchio is rife with thematically dark undercurrents which are often surprising to new readers. Both Pinocchio and Geppetto live in abject poverty and are frequently placed in life-threatening situations. While such peril and trauma is typical within the fairy tale tradition, Collodi pushes his narrative beyond even normative fairy tale conventions, emphasizing the reality of the sacrifices that Geppetto endures to protect his wooden offspring. However, Collodi does utilize several conventions of normative fairy tales in Pinocchio, such as the value of the number three, a recurring tradition in the fairy tale form. Pinocchio is provided three mentor figures in Geppetto, the Talking Cricket, and the Blue Fairy; the Blue Fairy has three symbolic deaths and rebirths; Pinocchio is choked three separate times; and Pinocchio experiences three different physical states—wood, animal, and man. Further, the story also invokes the literary heroic tradition, born of the mythic quests of such forebears as Ulysses, Aeneas, Christ, Don Quixote, and Hamlet, figures often used by critics in comparative analogies of Pinocchio scholarship.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

One of the most enduring works of children's literature, Pinocchio has been internationally recognized as a masterpiece of juvenile fantasy. Norman Budgey has asserted that, "Pinocchio has become a classic because its characters are true for all times and all places." However, many scholars have lamented how Collodi's original tale has often been marginalized or forgotten in favor of the revisionist take on Pinocchio that was presented in the 1940 Walt Disney animated feature. Jean-Marie Apostolidès has argued that, "the original context of the work has disappeared in Disney's production, the story as it is presented there has been rewritten in terms of the American values of the early forties" in which the "issue of illegitimacy … is downplayed in favor of a comfortism that turns Pinocchio into a well-adjusted little boy." Despite such complaints about the Disney-version of Pinocchio, Thomas J. Morrissey and Richard Wunderlich have alleged that, "Walt Disney's film capitalized on what was already, in 1939, a well-established tradition of simplification and misinterpretation." Morrissey and Wunderlich have contended that many early twentieth-century reprints of Pinocchio had already exaggerated the story's inherent didacticism to function as more of a cautionary tale for young readers, while abandoning other aspects of Collodi's narrative entirely. Nevertheless, Collodi's original text remains intact, a classic of juvenile literature that critic Glauco Cambon has cited as one of the three most influential books in Italian. Throughout the years, Pinocchio has become a national symbol of Italy. Angela M. Jeannet has opined that Pinocchio holds "a major presence in Italy's cultural history and collective consciousness," one that "lives on in the voices of adult readers, and in the fantasy world of children, he haunts the adult memory life, he becomes visible in each new set of illustrations, and acquires new depth with each critical revision."

PRINCIPAL WORKS

Editions of "Pinocchio"

^*Le Avventure di Pinocchio: La storia di un burattino [The Adventures of Pinocchio: The Story of a Marionette] (juvenile fiction) 1883

The Story of a Puppet; or, The Adventures of Pinocchio [translated by M. A. Murray; illustrations by Enrico Mazzanti] (juvenile fiction) 1891

Pinocchio's Adventures in Wonderland [translated by Hezekiah Butterworth] (juvenile fiction) 1898

The Adventures of Pinocchio [translated by Walter S. Cramp; illustrations by Charles Copeland] (juvenile fiction) 1904

Pinocchio: The Tale of a Puppet [translated by M. A. Murray; illustrations by Charles Folkard] (juvenile fiction) 1911

Pinocchio: The Story of a Puppet [translated by M. A. Murray; illustrations by Maria L. Kirk] (juvenile fiction) 1920

The Adventures of Pinocchio [translated by Carol Della Ciesa; illustrations by Attilio Mussiano] (juvenile fiction) 1925

Pinocchio: The Adventures of a Marionette [translated by Walter S. Cramp; illustrations by Richard Floethe] (juvenile fiction) 1937

Pinocchio: A Story for Children [adapted by Roselle Ross; illustrations by Henry Muheim] (juvenile fiction) 1939

Pinocchio [edited by Watty Piper; illustrations by Tony Sarg] (juvenile fiction) 1940

The Adventures of Pinocchio [translated by M. A. Murray; illustrations by Fritz Kredel] (juvenile fiction) 1946

Pinocchio, the Adventures of a Little Wooden Boy [translated by Joseph Walker; illustrations by Richard Floethe] (juvenile fiction) 1946

The Adventures of Pinocchio: Tale of a Puppet [translated by M. L. Rosenthal; illustrations by Troy Howell] (juvenile fiction) 1983

The Pinocchio of C. Collodi [translated and annotated by James T. Teahan; illustrations by Alexa Jaffurs] (juvenile fiction) 1985

The Adventures of Pinocchio: Story of a Puppet [translated and annotated by Nicolas J. Perella] (juvenile fiction) 1986

Other Juvenile Works

^†I racconti delle fate (fairy tales) 1875

Beppo; or, The Little Rose-Colored Monkey [translated by Walter Samuel Cramp] (juvenile fiction) 1907

"Giannettino" Educational Texts

Giannettino [adapted from Alessandro Parravicini's Giannetto] (textbook) 1876

Minuzzolo: Il Viaggio per l'Italia di Giannettino (textbook) 1878

Il Viaggio per l'Italia di Giannettino: Italia superiore (textbook) 1880

La grammatica di Giannettino (textbook) 1883

Il Viaggio per l'Italia di Giannettino: Italia centrale (textbook) 1883

L'abbaco di Giannettino (textbook) 1884

La geografia di Giannettino (textbook) 1885

Il Viaggio per l'Italia di Giannettino: Italia meridionale (textbook) 1886

Libro di lezioni per la seconda classe elementare (textbook) 1889

Libro di lezioni per la terza classe elementare (textbook) 1889

La lanterna magica di Giannettino (textbook) 1890

Notes

^*Pinocchio was originally published serially in the children's periodical Giornale per i bambini, between July 1881 and January 1883, under the title La storia di un burattino (The Story of a Marionette). The title of the serialized narrative was eventually changed to Le Avventure di Pinocchio (The Adventures of Pinocchio) after the first fifteen installments were published.

^†This volume is comprised of Italian translations of the fairy tales of Charles Perrault, Countess d'Aulnoy, and Leprince de Beaumont.

GENERAL COMMENTARY

Angela M. Jeannet (essay date autumn 1982)

SOURCE: Jeannet, Angela M. "Centenary of a Character: Pinocchio." Italica 59, no. 3 (autumn 1982): 184-86.

[In the following essay, Jeannet commemorates the one hundredth anniversary of Pinocchio by detailing the history of Collodi's creation of his ubiquitous title character.]

Pinocchio was born from 1881 to 1883, in a house on a narrow street in Florence, where a plaque now commemorates the event. The length of the birth process had to do with the fact that his story appeared in successive installments in the Corriere dei piccoli, a children's weekly; but, it may have also been related to the complexities of his gestation and his personality. In keeping with that extended epiphany, Italy is celebrating Pinocchio's centenary over a twoyear period, beginning with 1981 and continuing through 1983. In so doing, and in spite of a few concessions to more commercial and "spectacular" motivations, the celebrants acknowledge the importance of their connections to that character, for Pinocchio appears now to be a major presence in Italy's cultural history and collective consciousness.

The author of Pinocchio's story, Carlo Lorenzini, assumed the pen name of Carlo Collodi from his mother's birthplace, a village in the hills near the Tuscan center of Pescia. Born in 1826, he died in 1890, after being a journalist, a theatre critic, a volunteer in the Italian wars of independence of 1848 and 1859, and a petty bureaucrat in the Tuscan government until 1881. A prolific writer on all kinds of occasional topics, he translated Perrault's fairy tales into Italian, in 1875. It was his La storia di un burattino (The Story of a Marionette ), however, that became an instant success. Re-titled The Adventures of Pinocchio after the periodical had already run fifteen installments and the author had written the words "The End," it continued for fourteen more installments, then for yet seven more, the truly final ones. At which point, in 1883, The Adventures of Pinocchio—Story of a Marionette was published in book form.

As often happens with characters endowed with great vitality, particularly characters first encountered in childhood readings, Pinocchio has overshadowed his author. At the inaugural ceremony in Palazzo Vecchio, Giorgio Manganelli mused over the "more than useless, dangerous hypothesis" of an authorial imagination, and proposed an image of Carlo Collodi as "possessed" by Pinocchio, captured by that wooden creature, mischievous and rebellious, by that mythological monster with whom he, Collodi, had to begin a dramatic struggle, a duel. A being larger than the writer, and yet unaware of that fact, Pinocchio was thrown unceremoniously into the world of human beings by an overwhelmed Collodi.

This centennial celebration is a tribute to Pinocchio's pervasive presence: he lives on in the voices of adult readers, and in the fantasy world of children, he haunts the adult memory life, he becomes visible in each new set of illustrations, and acquires new depth with each critical revision. The bibliography on Pinocchio is incredibly varied and abundant, particularly in recent years, as one discovers perusing a little volume published by the Fondazione Carlo Collodi of Pescia, the Bibliografia collodiana, compiled by Luigi Volpicelli (Quaderno no. 13, 1980). From the perceptive statements of a Paul Hazard in 1912 to the recent readings in a structuralist, psychoanalytic, or marxist key, Pinocchio has engaged the critical attention of many scholars and writers. In addition, "parallel" texts have been written (most notably by Giorgio Manganelli in 1977, and in a brief Pinocchio con gli stivali by Luigi Malerba); Pinocchio has appeared on stage, interpreted by Carmelo Bene in one version, and accompanied by rock music in another; approximately 150 illustrators have worked on Pinocchio, in Italy alone; and the cinema, in the U.S., has reproposed the character of the versatile marionette, thanks to Walt Disney.

What has emerged, in this century of readings, is the ambiguity of the text, rooted in a complex tradition, and also its oneiric quality, its ability to suggest new readings and to reawaken elusive fantasies. The record of diverse readings is at the same time a documentation of the extraordinary changeability of the readers, of their concerns and biases, of their experiences and desires. A fluid panorama then takes shape, centering on the presence of a powerful name: Pinocchio.

The celebrations planned by the Comitato per le manifestazioni del Centenario di Pinocchio (Piazza Santissima Annunziata 12, Firenze) convey a sense of such complexities and ambiguities. There are exhibits of publications, translations, and illustrations of Pinocchio, with well-edited catalogues; exhibits of toys, cartoons, and films inspired by Pinocchio; and also scholarly meetings are planned, as well as two Mardi Gras celebrations in Viareggio (in 1981 and 1983). A critical edition of the book and a handsome anthology of Italian illustrators are part of the activities. While the children enjoy TV shows and amusement park creations celebrating Pinocchio, the adults will be invited to attend the round tables organized by writers, artists, and filmmakers.

Through it all, as the Italy of 1982 pauses to celebrate one of the most universal messengers of its culture, Pinocchio appears, as Luigi Malerba and Luigi Compagnone said at that same opening ceremony, as an image of freedom, of irreducible marginality, and of the fun and pain of living.

Thomas J. Morrissey and Richard Wunderlich (essay date 1983)

SOURCE: Morrissey, Thomas J., and Richard Wunderlich. "Death and Rebirth in Pinocchio." Children's Literature 11 (1983): 64-75.

[In the following essay, Morrissey and Wunderlich discuss the recurring themes of creation, birth, and resurrection

found throughout Collodi's Pinocchio, commenting that, "[i]t is Collodi's tribute to children that he chooses to depict their very real trials and triumphs in terms of mythic patterns ordinarily reserved for adults."]

What epic hero worth the title does not undergo some form of death and resurrection? This primal motif manifests itself in a number of ways in mythology and literature. Gods can die and be reborn, or rise from the dead. Such mythological events probably imitate the annual cycle of vegetative birth, death, and renascence, and they often serve as paradigms for the frequent symbolic deaths and rebirths encountered in literature. Two such symbolic renderings are most prominent: re-emergence from a journey to hell and rebirth through metamorphosis. Journeys to the underworld are a common feature of Western literary epics: Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Aeneas, and Dante all benefit from the knowledge and power they put on after such descents. Rebirth through metamorphosis, on the other hand, is a motif generally consigned to fantasy or speculative literature. Philomela, the Frog-Prince (in his many incarnations), the Beast of Beauty and the Beast, and Frost of Zelazny's "For a Breath I Tarry" are a few individuals who undergo such changes. These two figurative manifestations of the death/rebirth trope are rarely combined; however, Carlo Collodi's great fantasy-epic, The Adventures of Pinocchio, is a work in which a hero experiences symbolic death and rebirth through both infernal descent and metamorphosis. Pinocchio is truly a fantasy hero of epic proportions.

At first glance, American readers are likely to scoff at the greatness and symbolic importance of Pinocchio, for Collodi's masterpiece has suffered considerable deformation at the hands of adaptors and publishers.¹ To most of us Pinocchio is a light-hearted, light-headed tale of youthful mischief. Walt Disney's film capitalized on what was already, in 1939, a well-established tradition of simplification and misinterpretation. A few American critics, such as Glauco Cambon and James Heisig, have resisted the trend, and so have many American families; faithful translations of Pinocchio are readily available, even after ninety years of desecration. Our bibliographic research shows that, counting abridgements and adaptations, an average of two or more new Pinocchio s have appeared annually since the first U.S. printing in 1892. In Italy, moreover, Pinocchio has long been held a national treasure. Its author (born Carlo Lorenzini in 1826) was an often satirical journalist and a veteran of the military and political campaign for Italian reunification. He was both a man of letters and a man of the world whose social criticism did not always escape the censors. The period from 1981 to 1983 marks the Pinocchio centennial, and the Fondazione nazionale Carlo Collodi, a serious literary society, has tried to make sure that the world remembers the real Pinocchio.

Pinocchio is a fast-moving novel with engaging characters and crisp dialog. Much of the humor is ironic, usually at the expense of the heedless puppet. Furthermore, as a hero of what is, in the classic sense, a comedy, Pinocchio is protected from ultimate catastrophe, although he suffers quite a few moderate calamities. Collodi never lets the reader forget that disaster is always a possibility; in fact, that is just what Pinocchio's mentors—Gepetto, the Talking Cricket, and the Fairy—repeatedly tell him. Although they are part of a comedy, Pinocchio's adventures are not always funny. Indeed, they are sometimes sinister. The book's fictive world does not exclude injury, pain, or even death—they are stylized but not absent. How could Collodi write a true picaresque novel without accommodating the harsher facts of mortal existence? Accommodate them he does, by using the archetypal birth-death-rebirth motif as a means of structuring his hero's growth to responsible boyhood. Of course, the success of the puppet's growth is rendered in terms of his metamorphic rebirth as a flesh-and-blood human. On the road to rebirth, Pinocchio suffers setbacks that are themselves symbolic deaths and resurrections. Furthermore, along the way he joins the ranks of Odysseus, Aeneas, and Hamlet by obtaining information and advice from the world beyond. Beneath the book's comic-fantasy texture—but not far beneath—lies a symbolic journey to the underworld, from which Pinocchio emerges whole.

Pinocchio is one of those fortunate souls who does not always get what he wants but most assuredly gets what he needs. His behavior, or rather misbehavior, in the book's early episodes signals his need of correction, but the correction must come in the right form: experience tempered with a little good fortune. The puppet's misfortunes are the logical consequences of his folly, but they are also lucky opportunities for personal growth. What Pinocchio lacks at the beginning of the novel are the rudiments of self-control and civilized behavior—patience and concern for others. In the first eight chapters he has a chance to learn these virtues from Gepetto and the Talking Cricket, yet his failure to do so results in his exile from home and some symbolic lessons that foreshadow his encounters with the other world and its emissaries.

The disregard for his well-being and that of others that Pinocchio displays in the first four chapters is justly rewarded in the second four chapters, thus establishing the stimulus-response format that informs his quest throughout the book. The piece of wood that will become the hero is a bundle of amoral energy. It frightens Master Antonio with its insolence, then insults and strikes Gepetto, causing the two old men to come to blows. The carving of the puppet is like a nuclear chain-reaction in slow motion. As Gepetto liberates Pinocchio from the raw wood, he quickly learns with whom he is dealing. When the eyes are formed, they stare at the carpenter, who calls them "wicked,"² the nose grows faster than the old man can cut, the mouth derides him with laughter, and the hands grab the poor man's wig. Gepetto begins to regret having begun Pinocchio even before he has carved the feet; when they are finished, the puppet promptly runs away, the most immediate result of which is Gepetto's arrest for puppet abuse. Left temporarily fatherless, the puppet encounters the first non-parent significant other of his young life—the venerable Talking Cricket, whose warnings about the consequences of disobedience and sloth cause Pinocchio to "lose patience" (p. 27) and splatter him on the wall with a hammer.

These acts of unbridled passion are answered specifically in chapters 5-8 with symbolic and corporeal suffering. After killing the hundred-year-old cricket, the puppet receives a lesson in the value of revering life as his intended breakfast flies out the window when he cracks open its shell. Pinocchio is an agent of death who inadvertently becomes an agent of life; he also becomes very hungry. Searching for food, he gets his first taste of hell. He goes out into the "infernal night" (p. 35) to wander alone in what appears to be the "land of the dead" (p. 31). A man douses him with a chamber pot and he returns home "a wet chicken" (p. 32), thus resembling his fugitive breakfast, surely a humbling experience. In the morning he awakens to find that the offending feet which have caused such mischief have burned in Gepetto's purgatorial brazier. Pinocchio's feet are restored, but at a heavy price. First, he must endure a lecture by Gepetto; then he receives a gently symbolic lesson when the carpenter uses the ubiquitous empty eggshell to mix the glue with which he repairs the puppet. These events do not turn Pinocchio into a model of patience, filial piety, and respect for life, but from them he does learn to love Gepetto and even vows to go to school. Yet his promises prove hard to keep when he leaves home and is tempted by the bigger world; hence, he must experience with greater ferocity more hells of his own making, and he must be helped by increasingly more mysterious agents.

Pinocchio undergoes a series of adventures that draw on the descent-to-the-underworld motif hinted at in the earlier chapters. Some involve traditional images of hellfire, one is gothic, and another classical. Fires are abundant. He is nearly used as fuel to cook the Fire-Eater's mutton; he is almost incinerated in a tree by the assassins; he eludes a disgruntled peasant who wants to sell him for firewood; and he barely escapes frying at the hands of the Green Fisherman. It takes a good scare to make Pinocchio admit the reality of death. Killing the Cricket and refusing to believe in the existence of assassins demonstrate his initial ignorance about the fragility of life, but this unrealistic attitude gives way when the possibility of his own death offers him an unforgettable object lesson in mortality. He laughs at the assassins' vain attempt to stab him, but then the hooded figures manage to hang him. Collodi makes no effort to hide the puppet's agony: "His breath failed him and he could say no more. He shut his eyes, opened his mouth, stretched his legs, gave a long shudder, and hung stiff and insensible" (p. 74). Incredibly, even hanging is not enough to impress Pinocchio, but things change when Collodi employs delightful gothic farce. Although he lies near death at the Fairy's cottage, he will not take her medicine. At first he boasts that he does not fear death, saying, "I would rather die than drink that bitter medicine," but when four ink-black rabbits carrying a bier tell him, "We are come to take you" (p. 82), he begs for the tumbler. Later, the journey to the land of Cocagne features images of Hades. The ominous Coachman is a Charon-like figure who drives a silent black coach in the dark of night. He bites off the ears of one of the boys-turned-donkeys and utters the book's only remotely ribald joke, when he says of the injured beast, "Let him cry; he will laugh when he is a bridegroom" (p. 171). Collodi gives a tantalizing hint of the Coachman's unearthly status in the fragment of song:

During the night all sleep.
But I sleep never …
          [p. 170]

Of course, Pinocchio and Candlewick pay no heed to imagery and must literally turn into donkeys before they see their folly, but Collodi deftly shares the truth with his readers.

Pinocchio would have survived none of these ordeals without help from his friends, especially super- or preternatural ones. Like Dante, he needs his Virgil; like Odysseus, he needs his Athene. The Talking Cricket's ghost and the Fairy are the prime benefactors who guide him in learning to follow the dictates of his basically good heart. The Cricket is master of the bon mot. Just before Pinocchio squashes him, the insect warns him that loafers inevitably end up in jail or in the hospital: Pinocchio loafs and ends up in both places (the gorilla judge's prison and the Fairy's miraculous clinic). If Pinocchio is impetuous, the Cricket is a very patient soul who holds no grudge against the puppet for hammering him, for he returns to the world three times to help the wayward hero. First, he appears in ghostly form to warn Pinocchio about the assassins, to no avail. Second, he turns up as one of the Fairy's council of physicians. He is the only doctor who knows when to keep his mouth shut, but when he does speak, he utters the stark truth that awakens Pinocchio from his coma: "That puppet there is a disobedient son who will make his poor father die of a broken heart!" (p. 78). Finally, he serves as the Fairy's go-between when Pinocchio has finally proven himself worthy in the last chapter. The Talking Cricket is throughout the book a reliable ghostly counselor.

The Fairy is the pivotal influence on Pinocchio's development. Gepetto's self-sacrifice and the Cricket's good advice are important, but the Fairy's enduring patience and magical powers are the puppet's greatest assets. She has been called Kalypso³ and the archetype of the lost mother:⁴ these she is and more. She is a vital link in the merger of the death-resurrection and metamorphosis motifs. Not only does she facilitate Pinocchio's resurrections and final conversion to boyhood, but she too undergoes ritual deaths, resurrections, and transmutations—all on behalf of her adopted brother-son. She is, first and foremost, a wielder of magical power. She can clap her hands three times and command a raven to fetch Pinocchio from the oak tree. This is a significant point in a book in which three is a special number. In chapter 16 the Fairy summons three doctors and forgives Pinocchio three lies. The puppet is threatened by three fires, and three times he is choked—once by a rope, once by a dog collar, and once by a donkey's halter. Gepetto searches for his son for three months and the pigeon who takes Pinocchio to him has not seen the old man for three days (p. 114). The ghost of the Cricket appears to Pinocchio three times, and the Fairy feeds the puppet a three-course meal in the Land of Industrious Bees. Also, Pinocchio has three great mentors, Gepetto, the Cricket, and the Fairy. Perhaps the frequent use of the number three is an echo of Dante; more likely, it is designed to approximate a formula or incantation reinforcing the magical quality of the fictive world personified in the Fairy-sorceress.

Although the Fairy has lived in the woods for a thousand years, she chooses to undergo death and metamorphosis in order to help Pinocchio to a better understanding of the meaning of life and love. She passes through the stages of life from child to old woman, thus serving as the puppet's only role model who undergoes the maturation process. The device is also useful because, at the time Pinocchio first sees her, he has already rejected a father's guidance and would be unlikely to heed a mother-figure. She appears first at the window as a ghostly apparition who speaks without moving her lips, in "a voice that seemed to come from the other world" (p. 74). She makes no effort to save the fleeing marionette from the assassins; instead she presents him with an image of death that should intensify his appreciation of the preciousness of life. It does not do so, of course, so that later she must summon the rabbit undertakers to amplify the image. After Pinocchio's medicinal care, he breaks his promise to return at nightfall to his would-be Fairy-sister and, as a result, loses his money, does a stint as a watchdog, and goes to prison for four months. …