Like much of the fiction that characterizes the Latin American Boom, “Axolotl” employs an unusual approach to narrative structure. Rather than featuring a linear plot that centers the characters’ actions and conversations, “Axolotl” instead centers its narrator’s interiority. The story begins by revealing the narrative’s only major plot point: Three sentences in, readers learn that the narrator has become an axolotl. The bulk of the ensuing narrative focuses on the internal thoughts, fears, and obsessions that overtake the narrator as he studies the axolotls in their enclosure. This unconventional approach to both narrative structure and characterization allows Cortázar to develop the story’s primary thematic movement: how the narrator’s Transformative Obsession with the axolotls results in a Dissolution of Identity.

The narrator’s obsession with the axolotls begins abruptly, and Cortázar never offers any concrete reason why the narrator takes with such sudden intensity to these creatures. Instead, the story provides glimpses into the narrator’s interiority that illuminate his state of mind as the obsession takes hold. The narrator first approaches the axolotls’ enclosure because “The lions were sad and ugly, and my panthers were asleep” (4).