The Adventures of Pinocchio — Chapter 15

About This Passage

This is the chapter's gothic centerpiece — the introduction of the Blue-Haired Baby, whose exchange with Pinocchio about death and hearses establishes a moral atmosphere unlike anything earlier in the book. Copying it teaches you to register tone-shift through dialogue rhythm and quiet repetition: the doubled 'Scarcely' frames the encounter as a brief, dreamlike apparition. The passage contains the vocabulary words waxen, scarcely (twice), and compassion.

Narration Prompt

Summarize the chapter in eight to ten sentences, attending to its four phases: the run toward the candied house, the encounter with the Blue-Haired Baby, the failed knife attack, and the hanging on the Grand Oak. Identify which phase carries the chapter's deepest moral instruction and defend your choice.

Discussion Questions

1. Examine the candied house as a literary image. The chapter calls it 'shining afar' in a dark forest, white as snow, candied like sweets. What argument is Collodi making by giving Pinocchio's first sight of possible safety the form of something almost too good to be true? Account for what this image asks readers to notice about the relationship between desperation and the willingness to trust appearances.
2. The Baby with blue hair declares herself dead while plainly able to speak, and disappears soundlessly when she has finished. Defend a reading of why Collodi introduces her this way — as a riddle rather than as a rescuer. What does the riddle accomplish that direct help would not, and what does it suggest about how Collodi conceives of moral attention as something the reader (and Pinocchio) must earn?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide