It's that we don't enjoy moving a lot, and the tank is so cramped—we barely move in any direction and we're hitting one of the others with our tail or our head—difficulties arise, fights, tiredness. The time feels like it's less if we stay quietly.
In this quotation, the narrator of "Axolotl" explains why axolotls tend to stay very still throughout the day, despite the fact that they are capable of quick movement and are adept swimmers. The line can be related to the way humans can choose to "live quietly" in order to avoid conflict and confrontation, but how this avoidance may ultimately lead to stagnation.
"And in this final solitude to which he no longer comes, I console myself by thinking that perhaps he is going to write a story about us, that, believing he's making up a story, he's going to write all this about axolotls."
In this quotation, the narrator of "Axolotl," in axolotl form, refers to the hope that the man he once was will someday write a story conveying the possible interior plight of axolotls. This sad longing leaves the reader in a final lurch of meta-narrative reflection, wondering whether the story is being reported from an axolotl after all, or whether it is being transcribed from the fictional man-who-is-now-an-axolotl, (of course, all along, knowing that Julio Cortázar is responsible for writing all of the stories).
There's too much dust in the air, the slightest breeze and it's back on the marble console tops and in the diamond patterns of the tooled-leather desk set. It's a lot of work to get it off with a feather duster; the motes rise and hang in the air, and settle again a minute later on the pianos and the furniture.
In this quote from "House Taken Over," the narrator describes the Sisyphean task of taking care of his and his sister's enormous ancestral home. Their occupation of the home is an exhuasting and passive feat, and it reduces their existences to basically moving dust around a closed system. This line emphasizes the ineffectual, unproductive nature of both his and Irene's daily lives.
Sprawled in his favorite armchair, its back toward the door—even the possibility of an intrusion would have irritated him, had he thought of it—he let his left hand caress repeatedly the green velvet upholstery and set to reading the final chapters. He remembered effortlessly the names and his mental image of the characters; the novel spread its glamour over him almost at once.
This quote from "Continuity of Parks" underscores the estate owner's passivity and by extension, the reader's passivity, in the act of reading and absorbing literature. Cortázar's language and imagery very intentionally direct his reader's attention to the passivity of the estate owner. He is sprawled in his easy chair, his cigarettes are just within reach, he engages effortlessly with the content—indeed, to say he's engaging might be too strong a word, as Cortázar's description casts the novel as the actor, rather than the man, "spread[ing] its glamour over him" (64).
A lustful, panting dialogue raced down the pages like a rivulet of snakes, and one felt it had all been decided from eternity.
This quote from "Continuity of Parks" speaks to a central theme of the very short story: agency. While the comparison to snakes introduces an element of unpredictability to their exchange, the follow-up about destination reminds the reader that these are characters in a novel, and everything they do is predestined, and as long as they remain in print, they are destined to repeat themselves.
All of a sudden I wonder why I have to tell this, but if one wonders why he accepts an invitation to lunch ... or why when someone has told us a good joke immediately there starts up something like a tickling in the stomach and we are not at peace until we've gone into the office across the hall and told the joke over again; then it feels good immediately, one is fine, happy, and can get back to work. ... Or if you take a breath and feel like a broken window, then you have to tell what's happening, tell it to the guys at the office or to the doctor. Oh, doctor, every time I take a breath.... Always tell it, always get rid of that tickle in the stomach that bothers you.
In this quotation from "Blow-Up," Roberto Michel muses on why people feel the need to tell stories, and the emotional function of storytelling for the storyteller. He proposes that telling a story is like relieving an interior pressure, satisfying a need to exorcise some private knowledge and bare it to witnesses. Here, Cortázar seems to be proposing that storytelling can be, in a sense, therapeutic.
Michel is guilty of making literature, of indulging in fabricated unrealities. Nothing pleases him more than to imagine exceptions to the rule, individuals outside the species, not-always-repugnant monsters.
In these lines from "Blow-Up," Cortázar indulges in a bit of irony. Michel admits, in the third-person, to often spinning narratives without substantiation, as he does when imagining the home-life of the young Parisian boy cornered by the blonde woman in the park.
This final prediction always left us somewhat perplexed, because to end up in the street always seemed fairly normal to us.
In this quotation, the narrator of "End of the Game" describes what she thinks would be her mother's reaction if she found out that they were playing out by the train tracks. Her mother frequently proclaims that they will end up "out on the streets" if they continue with their rowdy behavior, but the children don't understand "out on the streets" as a condition—all they know is that they'd rather be outside than in, so "out on the streets," to them, doesn't sound so bad.
The note from Ariel didn't bother us so much, thrown from a train going its own way, that's how it is, but it seemed to us that Letitia from her privileged position was taking too much advantage of us. She knew we weren't going to say anything to her, and in a household where there's someone with some physical defect and a lot of pride, everyone pretends to ignore it starting with the one who's sick, or better yet, they pretend they don't know that the other one knows.
With this quotation, Cortázar further explores the narrator's complex regard for her cousin's medical condition, where she sees it at once for what it is, an unfair limitation on her freedom, but at the same time, she sees it as a boon to her cousin that comes with certain enviable advantages. The narrator makes a broader observation about households where there's someone with a disability based on her own limited experience, and also recognizes that pride motivates much of Letitia's actions when it comes to Ariel.
He managed to close his eyelids again, although he knew now he was not going to wake up, that he was awake, that the marvelous dream had been the other, absurd as all dreams are—a dream in which he was going through the strange avenues of an astonishing city, with green and red lights that burned without fire or smoke, on an enormous metal insect that whirred away between his legs.
In this quotation, taken from the end of "The Night Face Up," Cortázar emphasizes the switch—that what the reader assumed was reality is actually the dream space—with alienating language. What we know is a motorcycle becomes, in the mind of the dreamer, "an enormous metal insect," and traffic lights are fireless, smokeless light.
