Donkey

The Donkey in Pinocchio is both the result of a bodily transformation and a commodity in a system that profits from children’s idleness. Pinocchio and Lucignolo become donkeys after following bad companions and abandoning study; once transformed, they are sold to owners who expect work or performance from them. Their animal bodies make the consequences of that choice visible, while their separate fates—Pinocchio’s injury and resale, and Lucignolo’s death—show the harsh life that follows.

Identity and Transformation

The transformation occurs in Toyland, where Pinocchio and Lucignolo have spent their time playing instead of studying. As they crawl around the room on hands and feet, their arms become legs, their faces lengthen into muzzles, and pale gray coats speckled with black cover their backs. The change reaches its most humiliating point when tails sprout behind them. Their attempts to cry and complain produce donkey brays instead, so even their voices have become part of the bodily change.

Pinocchio later explains that he had been a wooden puppet and was close to becoming a boy. He connects his transformation to his unwillingness to study and his decision to listen to bad companions. His account turns the change into a consequence of choices, not an unexplained misfortune: the boy who had been on the verge of a different future wakes with donkey ears and a tail. The narrative’s emphasis on his shame makes the new body a public mark of the life he had chosen.

From Transformation to Sale

The donkeys do not remain with the Little Man. He gathers children who dislike books and school with promises and coaxing, carries them to Toyland, and lets them spend their time in games and noise. When their constant play and lack of study have turned them into donkeys, he takes possession of them and sells them at fairs and markets. The scheme makes the transformation part of a trade: children are lured in as customers of leisure, then sold as animals once the consequences have become visible. The Little Man grows rich through this business and becomes a millionaire.

Lucignolo is bought by a farmer whose donkey has died the day before. Pinocchio is purchased by the director of a company of clowns and rope-dancers, who intends to train him to jump and dance with the troupe’s other animals. Their sale divides the boys’ paths at once: one is sent to agricultural labor, the other to public entertainment. In both cases, the donkey’s value is measured by what a buyer expects its body to do.

Pinocchio as a Working Performer

Pinocchio’s new owner fills his manger with straw, but Pinocchio spits it out after tasting it. When he tries again, he recognizes that chopped straw does not taste like risotto Milanese or Neapolitan macaroni. The contrast between remembered human food and his animal ration makes the change concrete in an ordinary, bodily way: hunger remains, but the food and the life around it are no longer his to choose.

The circus director makes clear that Pinocchio has been bought to work and earn money. Pinocchio must learn to jump through hoops, break paper barrels with his head, and dance the waltz and polka standing on his hind legs. It takes three months of lessons, with many lashes, before he has learned the acts. The performance career is therefore not effortless spectacle: it is discipline imposed on an animal body for the owner’s gain. Pinocchio eventually falls badly during a show and is left lame in both legs. Because the director no longer knows what to do with a lame donkey, he sends Pinocchio back to market, where another buyer pays twenty soldi for him.

Lucignolo’s Death and the Donkey’s Significance

The evidence leaves Lucignolo’s life after his first sale uncertain, but later places him working for an orchard keeper. Pinocchio is made to turn a waterwheel, drawing up one hundred buckets; he is drenched in sweat before finishing, and the task is harder than anything he has done before. The keeper explains that his own donkey used to do this work but is now near death. Pinocchio asks to see the animal and discovers that it is Lucignolo.

Asked who he is, Lucignolo opens his dying eyes and manages to speak his name before closing them and dying. Pinocchio answers softly, wipes away a tear with a handful of straw, and mourns the companion whose bad influence had helped lead him into Toyland. Lucignolo’s end gives the donkey’s labor a cost that the Little Man’s profitable scheme conceals: the transformed boys are not merely sold but subjected to exhausting work, and in Lucignolo’s case that life ends in death. Pinocchio’s own injury and repeated resale likewise show how little protection or agency the animal has once it becomes someone else’s property.