ABSTRACT
If one were to believe Walt Disney's American film version of Pinocchio (1940), the wooden puppet turned human is a very happy boy at the end of his adventures. After numerous adventures, Pinocchio learns that honesty is the best policy, a message repeatedly driven home by the film. Yet, the Italian novel of 1882 by Carlo Collodi is a much different affair. Pinocchio is indeed content to turn human at the end of this narrative, but there is a tragic-comic element to the episodes that make one wonder why the puppet must endure so much suffering to become a proper and honest boy. Did Collodi intend to make an example out of Pinocchio, the good bad boy, who must learn to assume responsibility for his actions? Or, did he intend to show the harsh realities of peasant childhood in nineteenth-century Italy? Is Pinocchio perhaps a critical reflection of his own boyhood? After all, Carlo Collodi was not born to become a writer and journalist, nor was he born with the name Collodi. There was a fairy-tale element to his own education and development, and before we can fully understand why his Pinocchio, in contrast to Walt Disney's, is a tragic-comic figure, we might do well to look at Collodi's life and times.
