By the third sentence of ‘Axolotl’ we discover the narrator has become an axolotl. Although we see him develop an interest in a tank of the animals, we never understand how he became one. By the fourth paragraph, the narrator begins to flip between the third and first person to describe the axolotls / himself:
“I saw a rosy little body, translucent (I thought of those Chinese figurines of milky glass), looking like a small lizard about six inches long, ending in a fish’s tail of extraordinary delicacy, the most sensitive part of our body.”
The narrator’s voyeurism raises questions about what we take on – what we change about ourselves – when we do nothing but stare.
“The axolotls were like witnesses of something, and at times like horrible judges. I felt ignoble in front of them; there was such a terrifying purity in those transparent eyes. They were larvas, but larva means disguise and also phantom.”
When we focus intensively on only one interest or perspective does it limit our ability to see more broadly? Will we find ourselves in a tank, with glass between us and everything else, “condemned infinitely to the silence of the abyss, to a hopeless meditation”?
First published in Spanish in Litereria, 1952 and collected in Final del Juego. First published in English in End of the Game, Pantheon, 1967 and collected in Blow Up and Other Stories, Pantheon, 1985
A Personal Anthology 