The Adventures of Pinocchio — Chapter 19

About This Passage

This brief exchange contains the chapter's most disciplined Tier 2 vocabulary cluster — impertinent, solitude, wrathfully, ignorant — and stages the Parrot's pedagogical role through Pinocchio's irritable resistance to it. Copying it forces the older student to feel how Collodi loads a comic moment with diction normally reserved for grown-up satire.

Narration Prompt

Read Chapter 19 as a satire of legal institutions, with four targets in succession: the Field of Miracles, the Parrot's economic lesson, the Monkey-judge's tribunal, and the convict-amnesty. Which target receives Collodi's sharpest treatment, and how do you know?

Discussion Questions

1. Pinocchio's heart beats 'tic-tac-tic-tac like a big hall clock' as he walks to the Field of Miracles imagining a palace and a library full of candy. Argue why Collodi front-loads the chapter with such elaborate hope before the empty hole. What is the rhetorical asymmetry — paragraph of fantasy answered by a single 'Nothing' — accomplishing?
2. The Parrot, missing most of his feathers, delivers the chapter's only honest economic advice: money is gotten 'with your hands or invent[ing] something with your head.' Argue why Collodi places the chapter's wisdom in the mouth of a battered comic figure rather than in the Fairy or the Talking Cricket. What is the literary logic of bruised testimony?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide