The Adventures of Pinocchio — Chapter 29

About This Passage

This is the chapter's most economical articulation of an asymmetric doctrine of truthfulness: flattering self-presentation grows the nose; unflattering self-truth restores it. The marionette's body has been constructed to register that flattering lies and harmful lies are structurally identical — that there is no exception to the rule of honesty in the speaker's own favor. The passage rejects, in advance, the Romantic and modern reading in which a 'kind' or 'modest' self-flattering misrepresentation is treated as harmless social grease.

Narration Prompt

Retell Chapter 29 attending to its three-part structure: Aladdin's payment of the rescue debt opens the chapter; the lying-nose scene with the old man closes the rescue arc and opens the return-to-the-Fairy arc; and the long curriculum at the Fairy's door — Snail, eel-knocker, foot through the door, chalk-cardboard breakfast, faint, pardon, promise of transformation, closing 'but' — supplies the chapter's body. Note the way the closing dash signals that the transformation does not arrive on schedule.

Discussion Questions

1. Examine the structural rhyme between the rescue of Aladdin in Chapter 28 and Aladdin's rescue of Pinocchio in Chapter 29. Argue that the construction articulates an open-economy moral theology in which good actions persist, propagate, and return — and consider how Aladdin's line 'In this world all ought to help one another' adds doctrinal weight to the act. Place the construction in dialogue with closed-ledger views (certain Stoic and Kantian readings) in which the good is treated as merely its own reward.
2. Examine the lying-nose passage in which Pinocchio's nose grows when he speaks flattering untruths about himself ('a good boy, a boy that wants to go to school, to study, and to obey his parents') and shrinks when he speaks the unflattering truth. Argue that the chapter is articulating an asymmetric doctrine in which there is no flattering exception to honesty, and consider what this construction does to readings (post-Romantic, post-Freudian) in which self-presentation is understood as a permitted form of self-construction.

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide