what is the nature of his obsession with the axolotis

The
narrators apparent obsession with axolotls is key to what the Cortazar's story suggests about
how our minds relate to the world. seems to describe the narrator observing axolotls in a zoo
aquarium, but by the end of the story, it seems to be narrated by an axolotl staring out at a
human. The story makes this shift in an extremely subtle way, so you might characterize the
story as a Mobius strip: two sides with a single, unbroken surface.

The story
begins with the narrator mentioning his visits to a zoo/botanical garden in Paris (the Jardin
des Plantes), and how he became obsessed with the axolotls in the aquarium.

I would lean up against the iron bar in front of the tanks and set
to watching them. There's nothing strange in this, because after the first minute I knew that we
were linked, that something infinitely lost and distant kept pulling us together.

The use of the first-person plural voice (we, our, etc.) links
the axolotls and the narrator, making this the first step in the storys strange twist. Theres a
subtle difference between saying I knew that we were linked and saying I knew that I was
linked to the axolotls. The former immediately brings the self (the narrator) and the other
(the axolotls) together.

Instead of looking on the outside world in terms of
what is separate from ourselves, or outside of our minds, the narrator sees something ostensibly
external as an intimate part of who he is. Theres a powerful philosophical idea at play here. On
one hand, to imagine that our minds are fundamentally shaped by what is outside of us suggests
that we are less psychologically independent that we might normally imagine. To look at things
from the flipside, however (as Axolotl loves to do), if our minds and the external world are
so linked, then our minds also have some role in shaping what we see.

And
thats exactly what we observe as the narrative of Axolotl unfolds €“ by its end, we see that
the narrators observation of the axolotls, or what he imagines them to be like,
becomes the axolotl. When the story ends with the axolotl-narrator staring
out on the world, we have come full circle (or full twist): the observation of the axolotls
initially shaped the narrators mind, but then the narrator's mind observing the axolotls changed
the very notion of what the axolotls were.

The story also suggests why
axolotls, of all things, were what the narrator became obsessed with in this way. He
states:

It was their quietness that made me lean toward
them fascinated the first time I saw the axolotls. Obscurely I seemed to understand their secret
will, to abolish space and time with an indifferent immobility.

The silent, undeveloped nature of the axolotls (who live their lives as perpetual
adolescents, biologically speaking) became the perfect vehicle for the narrators
musings.

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