On Becoming a Real Human Child: Pinocchio

This is the second chapter of Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination by Vigen Guroian.

Pinocchio has a hard, wooden heart but wants to be a real boy; a good boy. Throughout the story, Pinocchio is carried along by love for his father. When he gets his wish in the end, "real boyhood is not so much a reward" [it's not earned salvation] "as it is the visible sign of a moral task that has been pursued . . . His good heart with its innate capacity to love finally dominates over his wooden head." "Being good is not a means to gaining boyhood or girlhood as a reward. Rather, being good is a quality of respect and responsibility toward others you love, firstly and especially one's parents and siblings." The blue fairy tells him that if he wants to be human, he must "begin by being a good boy." Pinocchio at first tends to shift blame for everything that happens to him. Every time he relates his history, his story gets less and less selfish as he grows less self-deceived and learns about his own responsibility in his naughtiness.

Guroian parallels Pinocchio with "the parable of the prodigal son and Jonah and the whale and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress." Pinocchio illustrates "the biblical motifs of drowning and rebirth and penance and baptism into new life." There's a similarity between him, as a donkey, being drowned but the fish eat away his donkey skin to reveal his wooden frame, and C.S. Lewis's Narnian episode when Eustace has his dragon layers peeled off to reveal his own skin. The Blue Fairy displays true Christian grace when she loves and forgives him in spite of his badness. He doesn't deserve her help, but she loves him and helps him anyway.

In his evolution from puppet to donkey to puppet to boy, Guroian finds another Narnian parallel when Lucy says how dreadful it would be if people started turning wild inside like the Narnian animals who lost their ability to talk.

Guroian says to accept no substitutes for the original story: "The modern abridgements and retellings of Pinocchio, of which Disney's is only the most well known, soften the violence of death in Collodi's original tale and as a result also sweeten and sentimentalize the love that grows within Pinocchio. Thus, they also fail to capture the gritty nature of the puppet's courage and endurance."