In reading Axolotl, penned by Julio Cortazar, I was really fascinated by the relationship between the tense in which the protagonist narrates and the extent of his identifying with the axolotls, and how this serves to disorient and slightly perturb the reader. The protagonist, in introducing the story, initially writes in the present, disclosing “I am now an axolotl.” Immediately, in the next sentence, he distances himself from the animals, saying “I got to them by chance…” Having asked the readers to suspend their disbelief and buy into the notion that the narrator is an extremely eloquent amphibian, Cortazar promptly tears apart his own illusion. Cortazar continues to play with this ‘is he or is he not’ mentality through the story, switching tenses often and also switching between the use of the personal pronoun and the collective pronoun, often in the same paragraph and alluding to the same subject. This constant uncertainty, even after being explicitly told that the narrator has metamorphosed into the axolotl, really serves to unsettle the reader and question the state of reality in the narrative.
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The switching of tenses throughout this story definitely stood out to me as well. Within the first paragraph, we see this switch— the speaker goes from speaking about the axolotls in a distanced manner to the eerie conclusion of the paragraph, “Now I am an axolotl.” This confusing opening paragraph, which readers would expect to be resolved by the end of the story, is in no way resolved, as the story concludes with even more confusion: “…perhaps he is going to write a story about us…he’s going to write all this about axolotls.” As you write, Kahini, Cortázar maintains this confusion by switching tenses throughout the story, representing the speaker’s ever-changing identity, encapsulated in the following line: “No transition and no surprise, I saw my face against the glass, I saw it on the outside of the tank, I saw it on the other side of the glass.” The glass that separates the speaker from the axolotls seems to be the physical “threshold” separating the speaker from being a human or being an axolotl. Though there is no moment in which the speaker crosses this threshold, readers use this glass wall as a marker between the two worlds. Perhaps this wall answers the question regarding the motif of eyes throughout the story— the see-through glass enables the speaker to shift between the two worlds, as he/she is able to access both worlds at once.
I very much so enjoyed the manner in which Cortázar’s narrator switched in and out of identities. At times, he was all axolotl- staring out of his tank and into the face he once occupied. Then at other times, he is completely human. I like to over-simplify things and tried to do so with this story. Is he simply an unreliable narrator? Regardless of how sane his perception may be, his behavior is certainly bordering on the insane. When you are freaking out everyone at the aquarium, something’s wrong. But just slapping a crazy-sticker on him and calling it a day is plain lazy. But what then- the axolotls are actually beings that transcend space and time? I don’t think so. I don’t think any of this story is meant to be taken literally. As our professor said, it seems to be commentary about a fractured Latin-American identity, and the narrator’s inconsistent identity furthered this theme.