Axolotl Short Story Analysis

In Julio Cortazar’s short story, Axolotl, the narrator felt a connection to the Axolotl by the use of immobility and the feeling of imprisonment. Just like Cortazar’s last short story, this one starts off very normal with a boy who visits the aquarium on a daily basis to see this fish called an Axolotl.
The things that seem to fight in the story is dream v. reality. This can be connected to Schizophrenia which is the difficult to tell the difference between real and fake. When the narrator first went to the aquarium, he “stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements”(Cortazar, 37). What attracted him to the axolotl was their lack of movement. Maybe to a regular person they would look very pretty and extravagant,
He bends his mind away from the idea of being human and visualize himself as being an animal. While doing this, he comes up with a lot things that this animal may be feeling and one of them is pain. “They were suffering, every fiber of my body reached toward that stifled pain, that stiff torment from the bottom of the tank”(Cortazar, 40). The narrator thought of their situation, of being caged in a tank full of water that doesn’t flow and the fact that the axolotl doesn’t go anywhere or do anything but stare at him for a very long time. The narrator doesn’t mention him staring at multiple axolotls either. It’s just this one axolotl that he stares at for a long time and physically, mentally and emotionally connects with
He connects with the axolotl physically, by making himself immobile, and mentally, by feeling how much they are in pain because of their living arrangements. Even though the axolotl looks very peculiar, it doesn’t seem to have any interesting things that it does other than stay in that one spot, occasionally moving and reacting the other axolotl in the tank with it. The narrator can be thought of as a person who thinks differently because most people can’t or are unwilling to put themselves in the shoes of others. Some people may even refuse to do that because of what they might find once they do. The idea of schizophrenia towards the end of the short story when it seems to shift to the point of view of the axolotl. The words seem to switch up, talking about the narrator staring at the axolotl and hurrying away, then coming back and the last thing that was said in the mind of the axolotl was that the narrator was going to write a story about him(Cortazar, 40). This is where the push and pull of what is real and what is not real comes into play because of how the story starts off normal and then ends in this very bizarre way. That is what made this story so