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.
Themes
The Dissolution of Identity
The narrator of “Axolotl” is never named. This is due, in part, to the intensely interior nature of the first-person narration that Cortázar employs in the story. However, this choice also serves the broader thematic work that the story undertakes. The namelessness of the narrator underscores how protean and liminal his sense of identity is, even from the story’s opening paragraphs. His sense of self becomes so subsumed by The Desire to Understand how the axolotls conceptualize their existence that he becomes convinced that he himself must also be an axolotl. This push-and-pull between a lack of identity and the assumption of a new identity that cannot be fully understood unfolds largely through the story’s ambivalent use of pronouns, with “I,” “we,” and “he” variously representing the narrator, the axolotls, the axolotl-narrator, and the human-narrator.
“Axolotl” never comes to any clear or easily interpretable takeaways about the dissolution of the narrator’s identity. The conclusion of the story, in which part of the narrator succeeds in becoming an axolotl but also becomes entirely separated from his former self, suggests that it is possible for identity to transform. However, the deeply isolating and harrowing final paragraph of the story raises questions about the costs of such transformation. The tone of the paragraphs in which the narrator understands the reality of his transformation is defined by a sense of profound unease. He initially believes himself a “prisoner in the body of an axolotl, metamorphosed into him with [his] human mind intact, buried alive in an axolotl, condemned […]” (8). The diction here suggests that the shift in the narrator’s identity from something liminal to something more fixed comes with a sense of entrapment, claustrophobia, and horrific finality. Though he later comes to believe he shares a common understanding with the other axolotls—“[I]f I think like a man it’s only because every axolotl thinks like a man” (11)—his tone remains wistful as he contemplates his inability to communicate with the human world.
The axolotl-narrator’s hope that the human-narrator will tell the axolotls’ story offers a potential path towards the reintegration of self, as evidenced by the fact that the story’s narrator seems to be both the human-narrator and the axolotl-narrator. However, this reintegration is incomplete, or at least unconscious: The axolotl-narrator predicts that the human-narrator will not know he is speaking for the axolotls but will instead believe himself to be “making up a story” (11). It is only imaginatively, through fiction, that the narrator’s alienation from himself can be reconciled.
Transformative Obsession
Throughout “Axolotl,” Cortázar is keenly interested in exploring the nature and consequences of obsession. The opening pages aim to immerse readers in the mindset of someone with a burgeoning obsession. The narrator’s preoccupation with the axolotls begins suddenly, without any explanation for why he becomes so fixated on this creature in particular. Instead, a lengthy paragraph inventories the narrator’s thoughts about the axolotls’ many body parts. Despite the seemingly extraneous detail it offers, the paragraph does significant work in showing how the narrator’s obsession develops. By the end of this exhaustive description of the axolotl’s body, the narrator’s thoughts transition seamlessly into imagining why the axolotls remain as immobile as they do—because “time feels like it’s less if we stay quietly” (5). This transition, coupled with the point of view shift into the first-person plural, shows the effects of obsession on the narrator’s mindset. In allowing the axolotls in their enclosure to become more real to him than the world around him, the narrator begins to change the very way in which he thinks. His obsession kickstarts a transformation that begins as a mental shift but becomes a physical one.
The ending of “Axolotl” investigates the consequences of this transformation. By the final paragraphs, a piece of the narrator has transformed into an axolotl—but not just any piece. The axolotl-narrator says that “what was his obsession is now an axolotl, alien to human life” (9). The narrator’s obsession is so total, so all-consuming, that it succeeds in its transformation. However, this transformation achieves almost the opposite of what the narrator originally intended when he first began to watch the axolotls: His mindset has become so axolotl-like that it is no longer knowable to his human mind. The question raised by this predicament, then, concerns the cost of this type of transformative obsession. The story’s ambiguous ending seems to suggest multiple answers. On one hand, the human-narrator is able to walk away from the axolotls in the final paragraph, never returning to them; as the narrator had begun to fear the axolotls, this frees him from an increasingly torturous obsession. On the other, the piece of the narrator that is now an axolotl has left him entirely and is completely lost to him. While the human-narrator seems unaffected by this transformation, the final paragraphs’ shift in point of view leaves the question of what he may be missing open to further thought.
The Desire to Understand the Other
The gulf between the self and the Other is a touchstone of Cortázar’s short fiction. In one of his most famous stories, “Casa Tomada” (“House Taken Over”), a brother and sister sequester themselves into increasingly smaller sections of their house as unseen and unknowable intruders overtake the remainder of the space. The story ends with the pair fleeing the house entirely, never having come into contact with the intruders at all. The story speaks to the fear of the Other and the impossibility of successful communication between the self and the Other.
“Axolotl” takes a similar, though slightly more optimistic, approach to this same theme. The story’s entire narrative drive is the narrator’s attempt to make sense of a species so dissimilar to himself that the prospect of communication seems impossible. Unlike the brother and sister in “Casa Tomada,” though, the narrator is moved by the desire to understand how the axolotls perceive and conceptualize their existence. Regardless of whether or not the narrator actually achieves this understanding by the end of the story, the impulse itself is fruitful. The desire to understand the Other is the springboard for many of the narrator’s philosophical observations about how different creatures’ physical realities might engender different ways of perceiving reality. For example, the narrator muses that the axolotls’ lidless eyes might be able to see at night, in which case “for them the day continue[s] indefinitely” (7). This supposition feeds the horror he feels on the axolotls’ behalf.
The story ends with a distinct separation of self and Other. The narrator, or a part of the narrator, has become an axolotl, but this entity is entirely distinct from the man who walks away from the axolotls’ enclosure. That being said, “Axolotl” still offers a glimmer of hope that communication between the self and Other might be achievable. In the final paragraph, the axolotl-narrator reflects that even though he is now “alien” to the human version of himself, the experience “succeeded in communicating something to [the human-narrator] in those first days, when [the axolotl-narrator] was still he” (9). The “something” that was communicated is left to interpretation. Perhaps the human-narrator now truly understands something new about the fears, terrors, and lives of axolotls. On the other hand, what was communicated might simply be the idea that different ways of physically existing in the world allow for different modes of perception. Either way, the axolotl-narrator suggests his counterpart will communicate something of the axolotl experience by writing a story about axolotls—presumably, the one that readers have just finished. Notably, this frames both the axolotl-narrator and the human-narrator as the voice speaking in “Axolotl” because while the axolotl-narrator is clearly the one telling the story, he identifies the human-narrator as the author. Despite the seeming bifurcation of the two narrators—self and Other—this implies some bridging of the divide.
