Pinocchio Changes Back from a Donkey into a Puppet

The attempted killing that restores Pinocchio from a donkey to a puppet turns a commercial transaction into a grotesque reversal. A buyer intends to drown him and make a drum from his unusually tough hide; instead, the sea and a school of fish strip away the donkey’s skin and reveal the wooden body underneath. The change frees Pinocchio from the animal form imposed by his earlier misbehavior, but it does not bring him safely ashore: as he swims away, the Great Shark swallows him.

The Sale and Attempted Drowning

The episode begins after the buyer has paid twenty soldi for Pinocchio, whom he has bought not to use as a beast of burden but for his hide. He explains that the skin is thick enough to make a drum for his village’s musical band. Pinocchio, already lame from his circus career, is thus valued as raw material rather than as a living creature. The proposed drum gives the scene its sharpest irony: the buyer sees a useful hide, while the reader knows that the animal body conceals a wooden puppet.

The buyer takes Pinocchio to a rock on the seashore, ties a stone around his neck, fastens a rope to one leg, and suddenly pushes him into the water. Holding the rope, he sits on the rock and waits for Pinocchio to drown so that he can remove the skin. After fifty minutes, assuming the donkey is dead, he begins hauling the rope back to recover his purchase. The wait makes the killing methodical: the buyer expects the water to do its work while he remains on shore, ready to claim the hide.

The Puppet Reappears

What surfaces is not a drowned donkey but a living puppet, wagging in the water like an eel. The change is not presented as Pinocchio’s voluntary transformation. Rather, the donkey’s outward covering has been eaten away, leaving the wooden figure that existed beneath it. The buyer stares in astonishment, unable at first to make sense of what the rope has brought up. He attributes the impossible result to the sea’s tricks, then warns Pinocchio not to play games with him.

Pinocchio offers to tell the whole story if the buyer will untie his leg. Curious, the buyer loosens the knot, and Pinocchio recounts how he had been a wooden puppet close to becoming a boy, but ran away from home because he disliked studying and listened to bad companions. He says that one morning he awoke as a donkey, complete with ears and a tail. Sold at the donkey market, he was bought by the director of an equestrian company, who intended to train him as a dancer and jumper through hoops. During a performance he fell badly in the theater and became lame in both legs; unable to use a lame donkey, the director sent him to be sold again. This account connects the buyer’s purchase to the earlier stages of Pinocchio’s transformation and explains why the animal is now injured and disposable in the circus director’s eyes.

The Fairy’s Intervention and the Fish

Pinocchio explains that the buyer’s plan has been thwarted by the Blue-Haired Fairy. He describes her as a mother who keeps watch over her children and helps them in misfortune, even when their reckless behavior might seem to deserve abandonment. On seeing him in danger of drowning, she sent an immense school of fish around him. The fish took him for a dead donkey and began eating: they consumed his ears, muzzle, neck and mane, the skin on his legs, the coat on his back, and even his tail.

The feeding gradually reverses the donkey form. Once the fish have eaten the animal covering from head to foot, they reach what Pinocchio calls the bone—or, more accurately, the wood. Their first bites reveal that the hard wooden body is not meat; disgusted by this inedible food, they scatter. The change therefore depends on the contrast between the two materials that make up Pinocchio’s apparent body: the fish can consume the donkey’s hide, but cannot eat the puppet beneath it. The Blue-Haired Fairy’s intervention saves him from drowning by setting in motion the very process that exposes him as wood.

Escape and Continuing Danger

The buyer rejects Pinocchio’s explanation and demands his twenty soldi back. He threatens to take the puppet to market again and sell him by weight as seasoned wood for the fireplace. The threat repeats the scene’s reduction of Pinocchio to a material commodity, first as drum hide and now as firewood. Pinocchio answers that he is content to be resold, then leaps into the water before the buyer can restrain him. Swimming away from the shore, he calls back that the buyer can remember him if he needs a hide for a drum, turning the original purchase purpose into a parting taunt.

His recovery of puppet form is consequently both an escape and a transition rather than a secure conclusion. Pinocchio gets free of the buyer and the planned slaughter, but, while swimming to save himself, he is swallowed by the Great Shark. The episode closes the donkey transformation by restoring the wooden body, while carrying Pinocchio directly into another danger at sea.