Axolotl

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.