Axolotl

Like much of the fiction that characterizes the Latin American Boom, “Axolotl” employs an unusual approach to narrative structure. Rather than featuring a linear plot that centers the characters’ actions and conversations, “Axolotl” instead centers its narrator’s interiority. The story begins by revealing the narrative’s only major plot point: Three sentences in, readers learn that the narrator has become an axolotl. The bulk of the ensuing narrative focuses on the internal thoughts, fears, and obsessions that overtake the narrator as he studies the axolotls in their enclosure. This unconventional approach to both narrative structure and characterization allows Cortázar to develop the story’s primary thematic movement: how the narrator’s Transformative Obsession with the axolotls results in a Dissolution of Identity.

The narrator’s obsession with the axolotls begins abruptly, and Cortázar never offers any concrete reason why the narrator takes with such sudden intensity to these creatures. Instead, the story provides glimpses into the narrator’s interiority that illuminate his state of mind as the obsession takes hold. The narrator first approaches the axolotls’ enclosure because “The lions were sad and ugly, and my panthers were asleep” (4). The use of “my” suggests an unusual possessiveness that the narrator feels toward the zoo animals. These creatures aren’t simply passing entertainment for him; he seems to desire a more robust connection with them, setting the stage for his obsession with the axolotls. Not just any animal will do, however. The fact that the narrator passes the lions by because they are “sad and ugly” (4) and the fish because they are “banal” (2) suggests that the nature of this relationship might have to do with the impact the animals have on his own mental state (4). The narrator is in search of companionship and intellectual stimulation—qualities, it seems, he has not found in his relationships outside of the zoo. In fact, the only time Cortázar depicts the narrator interacting with another human is during his brief exchange with the guard, which is notably marked by misunderstanding. The narrator thus responds to the axolotls’ otherness because he himself feels other.  

Cortázar uses the story’s narrative structure to show the intensity of the narrator’s obsession. The three opening paragraphs offer hardly any information at all about the narrator or his background; what little can be gleaned about his interests and personality is largely subtextual. By contrast, the fourth paragraph, in which the narrator first describes the axolotls, is longer and more detailed than the three opening paragraphs combined. This structuring allows readers to become consumed, as the narrator is, by thoughts of the axolotls. The narrator’s initial reactions to observing the creatures reveal still more about his mental state. He feels “disconcerted, almost ashamed” upon viewing the axolotls because he perceives them to be “isolated” (4), “wretched” (4), and claustrophobic. However, the narrator cannot understand what, if anything, the axolotls feel about their enclosure. He even notes that their features are “inexpressive” (4) and that the axolotls’ eyes present only “diaphanous interior mystery” (5), raising the possibility that the feelings of isolation and claustrophobia he associates with the axolotls are projections of his own interiority. This subtle approach to characterization paints a portrait of a lonely, isolated man who feels trapped by a life he cannot fully control. The fluctuating portrayal of the axolotls as both utterly alien and strikingly human (e.g., their nails) supports this reading; in the axolotls, the narrator finds a symbol of his alienation from other humans and from himself.

As the story progresses, the narrator’s obsession begins to change his self-perception. By the end of the fourth paragraph, the narrator is no longer consistently using the first-person singular to refer to himself and the third person to refer to the axolotls. Instead, he sometimes uses the first-person plural to refer to himself and the creatures as a single group/entity. This shift in point of view suggests that the narrator has a changing understanding of his relationship to the axolotls as well as of his own identity. At this stage in the narrative, though, the shift seems to be incomplete. He oscillates between the first-personal singular and first-person plural; he is torn between identities, neither fully human nor axolotl. This approach to showing the dissolution of identity through pronoun choice is a feature of Cortázar’s short fiction. In “Cefalea” (“Headache”), Cortázar exclusively uses the first-person plural to refer to the narrators, who are caretakers of creatures dying of a destabilizing illness. Even more pointedly, the narrator of “Las babas del diablo” (“Blow-up”) begins the story with the admission that “It’ll never be known how this has to be told, in the first person or in the second, using the third person plural or continually inventing modes that will serve for nothing” (114). For Cortázar, pronouns are a tool for exploring identity as the circumstances of a story ask its characters to reconsider how they view themselves.

The “Axolotl” narrator seems to come to a clear understanding of his dual identity by the end of the story. Driven by his Desire to Understand the Other, the narrator imagines how the axolotls must feel in their enclosure and how this must impact the way they view the world. This begins to shift his worldview and, in turn, the way in which he experiences his own physicality. At the very end of the story, while watching the axolotls, the narrator sees his own face and realizes that he is now an axolotl himself. The narrator’s slow dissolution of identity results in a total bifurcation of self: Part of him goes on living as a human (referred to from here on as the “human-narrator”), and part of his consciousness now exists as an axolotl (referred to as the “axolotl-narrator”). Any similarity between the two, the axolotl-narrator suggests, stems from the fact that axolotls think much as humans do. Nevertheless, the circumstances of their lives are so different that the axolotl-narrator denies a human can really understand what it is like to be an axolotl. Despite the seemingly radical transformation that has taken place, the narrative thus ends much as it began: with both the narrator and the axolotls poised between human and inhuman, knowable and unknowable. This fantastical ending raises thematic questions that resonate not only with Cortázar’s body of work but also with the literature of the Latin American Boom—in particular, the cost of The Desire to Understand the Other and whether or not an identity in flux can ever resolve into a single, stable whole. “Axolotl” offers no clear answers to these questions but rather allows readers to find their own insights.