Summary
The first story of the collection, "Axolotl," follows an unnamed first-person narrator who becomes obsessed with observing the axolotls in the aquarium exhibit of the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. In the first lines of the story, the narrator declares that after observing the axolotls so closely, he has actually become an axolotl. With this declaration, the narrator then charts his growing obsession with the amphibians up to the moment of his abrupt transformation.
The narrator describes his first encounter with the axolotls. He rides his bike to the zoo and, finding the lions in a sad state and the panthers asleep, decides to venture into the aquarium. The other animals there don't impress the narrator. Of the fish, he says, "the simple stupidity of their handsome eyes so similar to our own" (that is, human eyes), suggests to him nothing noteworthy or interesting to glean about their existence. The axolotls' eyes are totally different, without pupils or irises, a solid gold color that speaks "of the presence of a different life, of another way of seeing" (6).
The narrator looks the creatures up in the library at Sainte Geneviève and learns about their taxonomy, geographical origin, and historical uses in food and medicine, but the facts and figures fail to capture his attention the way the creatures themselves do, so he returns the next day to stare at them some more. And the next day. And he continues returning like this for an indeterminate stretch of days and weeks, aware that the ticket taker and guards think he's crazy, and stares at the axolotls. He's struck by how little they move but, reflecting back with the knowledge gleaned by having become an axolotl himself, learns that they stay so still so as to make the time pass easier. To move is to disturb another axolotl, and this causes conflict and fights to break out in the aquarium, and they find it's not worth it.
One day, while observing the axolotls, having increasingly felt his own body and sensibilities extending toward the suffering and immobility of the nine axolotls in the tank, the narrator, face pressed against the glass, all of a sudden sees his own face staring back at him, and he realizes at this point that he has become an axolotl. Much to his horror, he also understands that he retains the same inner consciousness and awareness that he had as a human, but he is unable to communicate verbally with the other axolotls, who appear also to contain this silent recognition within them. The man (formerly the narrator) seems in his continued observations to give special attention to the axolotl to which part of his consciousness evidently has transferred. His visits become less and less frequent, and the narrator (now an axolotl) believes that the man who he formerly was is simply "coming out of a habit" (9). The axolotl narrator concludes with the hope that the man he formerly was will someday write a story about the axolotls.
Analysis
As the first story of the collection, "Axolotl" establishes some of Cortázar's most frequent themes and narrative concerns. "Axolotl" is concerned with temporality, point-of-view, embodiment, and meta-narrative, all in the short space of barely seven pages. The first-person narration seamlessly switches between embodied realities—at times favoring the human perspective, at others the axolotl's, and at special moments throughout the story, the narration seems to emit from both human and axolotl perspectives concurrently. By announcing in the first lines of the story that the narrator is an axolotl, Cortázar dispenses with any element of surprise or "twist" when the transformation is ultimately described. Instead, by establishing the reader's expectations, we wonder why and how the story reaches its known conclusion, rather than bothering to ask the less interesting question of what the conclusion will be.
This declaration of the transformation also allows Cortázar to experiment with perspective and pronouns throughout the story. At times, the narrator refers to axolotls with the third-person plural pronoun their—e.g. "their oil was used (no longer used, it said) like cod-liver oil" (4). At other points in the story, the narrator refers to the axolotls with the first-person plural pronoun, we—e.g. "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" (5). The reader understands that the narrator is still working out his identity in the midst of this strange and unprecedented transition from man to amphibian.
Then there is the matter of the man still existing after the transformation takes place. The narrator describes seeing his face outside the tank, peering in at himself among the axolotls. And the narrator still refers to the face and mouth of the man in the possessive form, but as the man visits with diminishing frequency, he becomes more alien to the narrator, now an axolotl. This forces the reader to ask which part of the narrator—part of whom still inhabits a human form—transferred to the body of an axolotl. What part of his former self cleaved from his personhood and now possesses an axolotl? Cortázar leaves his reader a clue in the denouement. As the axolotl narrator describes the gradual rate at which his former human form's visits wane, he says, "the bridges were broken between him and me, because what was his obsession is now an axolotl, alien to his human life" (9). So, we can read the part of the narrator "buried alive in an axolotl" (8) as being the part of him that became obsessed with the creatures, suggesting that that obsession never truly died, but rather buried itself in the thing itself, to be left behind.
Cortázar's story analyzes the transient nature of human involvement, whether it be focus or obsession, and portrays these involvements not as habits to be forgotten, but as parts of the self that are literally shed and left behind at their place of involvement. Cortázar's analysis of why axolotls stay so still can be interpreted as an analogy for how human beings justify the choice to live quiet, inoffensive lives. The final line of the story—"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" (9)—Cortázar engages with the outermost limits of the story, a meta-narrative nod to the materiality of the story itself; that it is narrated by an axolotl trapped in a tank belies the fact that the story must be written, physically typed out, by a human being, but Cortázar addresses this conflict (which, until the final line, is not an insurmountable conflict for the reader who is willing to suspend disbelief or imagine this story as a stream of consciousness from an axolotl, somehow magically transcribed into a story) by introducing the idea that this whole narrative is being conceived by the man who observes the axolotls in the first place. Here, in its final line, the story arrives at a rift, an impenetrable loop of logic that leaves the reader open to either possibility: that the story is reported by the axolotl, or by the man who left part of himself in the axolotl tank.
