Axolotl Characters

This Study Guide consists of approximately 44 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Axolotl.

Axolotl Characters

This Study Guide consists of approximately 44 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Axolotl.
This section contains 226 words
(approx. 1 page at 400 words per page)
Buy the Axolotl Study Guide

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...

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This section contains 226 words
(approx. 1 page at 400 words per page)
Buy the Axolotl Study Guide
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Axolotl from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.