"Axolotl" is a work of short fiction by Julio Cortázar, first appearing in the Spanish language collection Final del juego (1956), and first in the English language in End of the Game and Other Stories (1963).Stavans, 1997 p. 149: Selected Bibliography
Plot "Axolotl" is presented from a first-person singular point-of-view by an unnamed but reliable narrator. The story takes place at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.
Visiting the zoo, the narrator visits the lions and panther enclosures, but finds them pathetic; he proceeds to the aquarium. There he encounters a number of Axolotl salamanders, members of the genus Ambystoma, and finds them mesmerizing. He develops an obsession, returning day after day to peer through the glass into their "little pink aztec faces".Cortazar, 1985 pp. 4, 7 The security guard is mildly alarmed at his behavior, but declines to interfere. In time, the narrator fearfully perceives that the salamanders are not merely reptiles, but conscious beings who are taking possession of him. A process of "metamorphosis" ensues, and his mind and body is exchanged with one of the amphibians in a process of replacement.Cortazar, 1985 pp. 7–8
The narrator now reports from his new existence as a salamander living in the tank. He acknowledges to himself that his condition is permanent: "I am an axolotl for good now, and if I think like a man it's only because every axolotl thinks like a man inside his rosy stone semblance."Cortazar, 1985 pp. 7–8 The narrator is comforted by the thought that the free-living metamorphosed salamander in its human form may write a story about axolotls.Stavans, 1997 p. 40: Plot sketchDitski, 1983 pp. 111–112: Plot sketch
Analysis Novelist and critic Ilan Stavans places "Axolotl" among those works that Cortázar wrote as a form of therapy to purge his own neurotic anxieties.Stavans, 1997 p. 13: This has "a theme or leitmotiv [of] neurosis…" Cortázar commented on this process:
The narrator in "Axolotl is inexorably drawn into a Borgean "labyrinth".Ditski, 1997 p. 112 Literary critic John Ditski writes:
Footnotes
Sources Cortázar, Julio. 1985. Blow-Up and Other Stories. Pantheon Books, New York. pp. 51–59. (paperback) Cortázar, Julio. 1986. "Around the Day in Eighty Worlds." North Point Press, San Francisco. Translated by Thomas Christensen. . Quoted in excerpt from the essay in the New York Times, January 26, 1986. https://www.nytimes.com/1986/01/26/books/the-writer-in-a-trance-anguish-anxiety-and-mircales.html Accessed 1 December 2025. Ditski, John. 1983. End of the Game: The Early Fictions of Julio Cortázar. Review of Contemporary Fiction 3, no. 3, (Fall 1983) (pp. 38–44) from Julio Cortázar: A Study of the Short Fiction. 1996. pp. 110–123. Twayne's Studies in Short Fiction, Gordon Weaver, general editor. Twayne Publishers, New York. Stavans, Ilan. 1996. Julio Cortázar: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne's Studies in Short Fiction, Gordon Weaver, general editor. Twayne Publishers, New York.