The unnamed narrator of "Axolotl" is a lonely man who becomes so obsessed with axolotls (Mexican salamanders) that he becomes one—or at least, believes that he does. Cortazar provides few details about the narrator, but the details he does provide are revealing. It is a spring morning, and Paris is "spreading its peacock tail after a wintry Lent," when the narrator visits the Jardin des Plantes. He remarks that he is (or "was") a friend of the lions and panthers and had never before entered the "dark and humid" aquarium. This suggests that the narrator is attracted to all that is beautiful and assertive in nature: the morning, spring days, lions, and panthers. In fact, it is only when he finds that the lions are "ugly and sad" and that the panthers are sleeping—in other words, when they do not measure up to his image of...