Cortarzar's Axolotls

In the short story Axolotl by Julio Cortázar, the human narrator is drawn from strolling outside, to inside an aquarium, to an axolotl tank, drawn closer and closer physically, and finally face to face with the axolotl, only separated by the clear glass. The narrator notices the axolotls' immobility as he becomes increasingly enchanted.

However, these specific axolotls (as no general axolotls exist) are not the pure exteriority waiting for the human to be unmade and reconstituted into other assemblages. The axolotls "did not succeed in revoking a mysterious humanity" and were also "not animals". Instead, “devouring [the narrator] slowly with their eyes”, Cortázar’s animals make it difficult for the narrator-philosopher to appropriate the animal-human difference for their own ends.

Then suddenly, with “no transition and no surprise,” the narrator now perceives his own face from within the aquarium—he has become an axolotl. The initial horror at this transformation quickly subsides; what remains is the lamentation that human lucidity persists. The earlier tension between the self and other dissolves into a passive stasis. The narrator as axolotl watches the human visitor return less and less frequently, wishing for the day he will stop visiting altogether.