Pinocchio Is Thrown into the Sea and Returns to Puppet Form

Causes and Sale

After Pinocchio’s circus performance leaves him injured, a veterinarian examines him the next morning and declares that he will remain lame for life. The diagnosis immediately becomes an economic judgment. The director tells a stable boy that a lame donkey would be a useless eater and orders him to take Pinocchio to the square and sell him. The injury is thus not treated as a condition for which the circus might continue caring for him: it makes him an expense to be disposed of.

A buyer appears at once and asks the stable boy’s price. Though the boy asks twenty lire, the buyer offers twenty soldi, explaining that he does not want the animal for work. He wants Pinocchio’s exceptionally tough hide to make a drum for his town’s band. The price and intended use reduce Pinocchio to the material that can be taken from him; the sale turns his misfortune into a plan for converting his body into an object.

The Attempt to Drown Him

Once he has paid, the buyer leads Pinocchio to a rock on the seashore. He ties a stone around Pinocchio’s neck, binds one leg with a rope, and suddenly shoves him into the water. The stone drags Pinocchio down, while the buyer stays on the rock holding the rope. He waits for the donkey to drown so that he can pull him back and take the hide. The violence is deliberate and practical: the buyer expects death to be only the step before making the drum.

After fifty minutes, convinced that Pinocchio must have drowned, the buyer starts pulling in the rope. What surfaces is not a dead donkey but a living wooden puppet, wriggling at the waterline like an eel. The reversal first registers as disbelief: the buyer stares, stunned, and asks where the donkey he threw into the sea has gone. Pinocchio answers that he was that donkey. The former animal has returned in the very moment when the buyer expects to retrieve a corpse.

How the Puppet Reappears

Pinocchio explains that the Blue-Haired Fairy is his mother and that she watches over children and helps them in misfortune, even when their bad behavior might seem to warrant abandonment. When she saw him in danger of drowning, she sent a vast shoal of fish around him. Mistaking him for a dead donkey, the fish began eating him: some consumed his ears, muzzle, neck, mane, the skin on his legs, or the covering on his back; one even ate his tail.

The explanation makes the buyer’s intended use of Pinocchio’s hide the means by which that hide disappears. The fish consume the donkey’s skin from head to foot, but when they reach the wood underneath, they discover that it is not flesh they can eat. Repelled by the inedible material, they swim away. What remains is Pinocchio’s wooden body, alive and recognizable as the puppet he was before his transformation. The change is not a return brought about by the buyer’s mercy: the fish sent by the Fairy undo the visible animal form through the act of eating it.

The buyer reacts with horror and swears off eating fish, imagining that a fried red mullet or hake might contain a donkey’s tail. His response carries the scene’s grotesque humor into ordinary food, but it also shows how completely he has mistaken what happened: he sees a comic danger to his meals, while Pinocchio describes the loss of his donkey covering and his survival. Pinocchio agrees with the buyer’s distaste for the prospect, then finishes explaining why the rope has brought up a puppet instead of a drowned animal.

Escape and Reversal

The buyer does not accept the loss quietly. Angry that he has spent twenty soldi, he demands his money back and threatens to take Pinocchio to market again, this time to sell him by the weight as seasoned wood for the fireplace. The threatened use changes from making music out of the hide to burning the puppet as fuel; in both plans, the buyer treats Pinocchio as material rather than as a speaking, living being.

Pinocchio says he is content to be resold, but his action immediately contradicts the buyer’s assumption that he can be kept or disposed of. He leaps into the sea and swims cheerfully away from the shore, calling back that the buyer can remember him if he needs a hide for a drum. The escape reverses the opening arrangement: the buyer had controlled Pinocchio with a rope and waited for him to die, but now Pinocchio chooses his direction and leaves the would-be purchaser behind. His return to puppet form ends the attempted sale as a donkey, while his swim away prevents the buyer from turning that recovery into another sale.