28 pages • 56 minutes read
Julio CortázarAxolotl
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1952A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Ambiguous Ending
The ending of “Axolotl” leaves much to interpretation, including whether or not the narrator’s transformation into a larval amphibian actually occurs. It is possible to read the ending of this story literally, with a piece of the narrator actually becoming trapped inside of an axolotl and thereby unknowable to himself. It is also possible to read this as something that occurs only in the narrator’s mind. This ambiguity raises questions about the limits of human knowledge. Just as readers cannot know whether or not the narrator’s transfiguration is real, the story’s ending asks readers to consider whether their own identities are fully knowable.
Conflict
“Axolotl” is an unusual story in that it lacks any definite external conflict. The closest the story comes to providing external conflict are the few brief moments when the narrator interacts with the aquarium guard. The narrator notices that the guard at times seems uncomfortable with his interest in the axolotls, but this minor area of conflict is never really developed. (If anything, this lack of development highlights how entirely detached the narrator is from the external world and how wholly his sense of self is disconnected from his material reality.) This near-total lack of external conflict allows Cortázar to instead foreground the narrator’s numerous internal conflicts, including The Dissolution of Identity, Transformative Obsession, and The Desire to Understand the Other. The narrative begins with the narrator’s internal struggle to find connection with other living creatures; when he does discover a connection with the axolotls, this struggle shifts into an even more interior conflict about how this connection limits and defines his identity.
Point of View
Like so much of Cortázar’s work, “Axolotl” takes an unconventional approach to point of view. The majority of the narrative is told in a close first-person narration in which the axolotls are referred to in the third person. However, at certain—and often unexpected—moments in the narration, the narrator shifts to first-person plural when referring to himself and the axolotls. This shifting point of view not only underscores the progression of the narrator’s understanding of his subjectivity, but it also introduces the idea that this understanding is unstable and nonlinear. If the story had a single, clear shift from the first person singular into the plural, it would suggest that there was one clear moment in which the narrator’s identity shifted. The multiple instances of the first-person plural, and the slippages back into the singular, instead suggest that the narrator’s self-perception is in a state of flux throughout the story. This usage of point of view underscores the idea that self-definition is a process with give-and-take rather than a linear progression with clear starting and ending points.
Metafiction
“Axolotl” ends with the axolotl-narrator saying, “I console myself by thinking that perhaps he [the human-narrator] 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). This conclusion introduces a metafictional element that calls to the reader’s attention the fact that they are reading a story. In hypothesizing that the human-narrator will write a story about axolotls, the axolotl-narrator creates a connection between the act of writing and the experience of transformation that the narrator has just gone through. The axolotl-narrator says that he will be “consoled” by the human-narrator writing about his experience. One possible interpretation of why this would be consoling could have to do with the relationship between writing and The Desire to Understand the Other. Perhaps the axolotl-narrator views writing fiction as a way for the human-narrator to make sense of his experience and begin over again the work of connecting to a viewpoint that is no longer his own. Coupled with the seeming duality of the story’s narration—the fact that the narrator seems to be both human and axolotl—the story’s metafictional elements thus invite reflection on the extent to which writing and reading allow people to inhabit multiple perspectives simultaneously.
