Summary
Feeling hopeless, Pinocchio spots a white house where he believes he can take refuge. He races to it, knocks on the door, and gets no response. He pummels the door and a window is opened by a beautiful child with a very white face and blue hair. She informs him that everyone in the house is dead, including her. Pinocchio pleads for her to let him in. The assassins catch up and stab Pinocchio with razor-sharp knives that break on Pinocchio’s hard wooden body. They resort to hanging Pinocchio by the neck from a tree called the Big Oak. Pinocchio swings from the noose for hours, slowly losing his ability to breathe, until he hangs still.
The blue-haired child, who we now learn has wings and is a fairy, calls for a falcon to rescue Pinocchio by breaking the noose with his beak. The Falcon does so, and the Fairy is delighted to learn Pinocchio fell to the ground alive. She claps her hands to summon the Poodle who walks on hind legs and dresses like a gentleman. She sends the dog off in a carriage to retrieve the puppet. Once he is back in her white house, the Fairy asks three doctors—the Crow, the Owl, and the Talking Cricket—to determine whether Pinocchio is alive or dead. During their deliberations, the cricket explains that he knows Pinocchio, and denounces him as a disobedient son who will break his father’s heart.
When Pinocchio shudders into movement, the three doctors leave. The Fairy assesses Pinocchio as having a fever. She gives him medicine that he refuses to take because it is too bitter. He convinces her to give him lumps of sugar first, but after eating the sugar greedily he still claims the medicine is too bitter to take. Four ink-black rabbits enter the room carrying a bier (a stretcher for bearing coffins or dead bodies); they tell Pinocchio he only has a few minutes to live. He finally takes the medicine, and is cured of his illness. The rabbits leave. Back to health, Pinocchio explains to the Fairy that he needed to be persuaded because all boys are more afraid of the remedy than the illness. He fills her in on what brought him to her home, claiming he lost his gold pieces when she asks where they are. At the lie, his nose grows two inches longer. With every follow-up question the Fairy asks, he tells another lie, changing his story as he goes. Meanwhile, his nose keeps growing longer and longer until he cannot move in any direction. The Fairy laughs at his lies.
After letting Pinocchio cry over his nose for half an hour as punishment for the disgraceful fault of lying, she feels compassion and summons a thousand woodpeckers to fly in the window. They peck at his nose until it is normal-sized. The Fairy sends Pinocchio on his way. By the base of the Big Oak, Pinocchio meets Cat and Fox again. They are horrified to learn about his tribulations with the assassins. He learns Cat lost her paw because a wolf ate it. Although Pinocchio wants to reunite with his father, he easily convinced to continue with his companions to the Field of Miracles to plant his gold. After walking half the day, they lead him to a town called “Trap for Blockheads” and instruct him to put his gold pieces in the soil. He then goes off for the twenty minutes they advise.
Pinocchio returns to the field imagining even more money than the two thousand he has been promised. When he arrives, he finds nothing growing. A parrot in a nearby tree laughs at him for being foolish enough to believe everything he is told. He informs Pinocchio that Cat and Fox dug up the money and fled. Pinocchio runs to the Courts of Justice in the town and pleads his case to a gorilla judge. The gorilla rules in an unexpected way, stating, “That poor devil has been robbed of four gold pieces; take him away and put him immediately into prison.” Pinocchio serves four months. He is released because the Emperor reigning over the town decrees, as part of triumphant celebrations, that all prisoners be freed.
Pinocchio runs toward the blue-haired Fairy’s house, wondering if his papa will be there and lamenting all his misfortunes. However, Pinocchio considers his misfortunes his own fault because he has been so disobedient. He resolves to change. Pinocchio stops when he encounters a giant serpent lying across the road. Its tail is smoking. Eventually, Pinocchio asks the serpent to move, but it doesn’t. When it springs up, Pinocchio falls back in terror, getting his head stuck in the mud and kicking out his legs wildly. The serpent laughs convulsively until it breaks a blood vessel and dies. Pinocchio continues on, seeing grapes to pick from a vine. He is overjoyed to find the grapes but winds up getting his feet caught in a metal trap set out for polecats (weasels or skunks).
While trapped, Pinocchio speaks to a passing firefly, appealing to it for help. The firefly is compassionate at first, but when he learns that Pinocchio was picking grapes that didn’t belong to him, he tells Pinocchio it serves him right. He tells Pinocchio that hunger is not a good enough reason to justify theft. Just then the peasant farmer who owns the field comes out to see if his traps have caught any polecats, who eat his chickens. He is angry to learn Pinocchio was stealing grapes, and takes the puppet out of the trap roughly. He puts Pinocchio on a chain in the yard, saying he will be a guard dog for the night because his dog died that day. Cold, hungry, and afraid, Pinocchio laments his decision to live as a vagabond and he wishes he could be born again as a good son.
Analysis
Still on the run from the assassins, Pinocchio fails to take refuge at the home of the blue-haired fairy. Because they are unable to kill the hard-bodied wooden puppet with knives, the assassins hang Pinocchio from a large oak tree and wait for him to stop breathing. In this graphic scene, Collodi’s desire to show Pinocchio suffering harsh punishments for his faults is undeniable. Collodi even intended the original serialization to end with Pinocchio’s death by hanging, but he was convinced to keep writing beyond this tragic end.
When the Fairy rescues Pinocchio and nurses him back to health, Collodi builds on the theme of dishonesty. Perhaps not yet trusting the Fairy not to try to rob him as well, Pinocchio lies about still being in possession of his four gold coins. With each lie about where the coins are, Pinocchio’s nose grows longer. Eventually, his nose is so long that he cannot move. This symbol depicts Pinocchio becoming literally trapped by his lies.
Although the Fairy leaves Pinocchio to deal with the consequences of his fibbing, she eventually frees him by having woodpeckers reduce his nose to its original size. Having formed a close bond with the Fairy, who he now considers his little sister, Pinocchio sets off for home. However, he encounters the Fox and the Cat immediately. In an instance of dramatic irony, the reader understands that the Cat lost its paw because Pinocchio bit it off while the Cat was disguised as an assassin. Pinocchio, meanwhile, remains oblivious to the harm the con artists have caused him.
The themes of greed, laziness, and living with consequences arise again when Pinocchio’s foolhardy belief that the Field of Miracles would multiply his gold turns out to be incorrect. As another punishment for his faults, Pinocchio finds himself in prison, even though he is the victim of the Fox and the Cat’s crime. Nonetheless, Pinocchio laments his foolishness and his lazy belief that he could become rich without having to do honest work.
Once free from prison, Pinocchio quickly finds himself ensnared in a trap that a peasant set out to deter polecats (weasels). Suffering the consequences of his attempted theft of the man’s grapes, Pinocchio is made to act as his guard dog for the night. Once again, Pinocchio laments his miserable state and wishes he could go back in time and be a good boy from the start—another of Collodi’s moralistic messages to his readers.
