One day, while observing the axolotls, having increasingly felt his own body and sensibilities extending toward the suffering and immobility of the nine axolotls in the tank, the narrator, face pressed against the glass, all of a sudden sees his own face staring back at him, and he realizes at this point that he has become an axolotl. To move is to disturb another axolotl, and this causes conflict and fights to break out in the aquarium, and they find it's not worth it. He's struck by how little they move but, reflecting back with the knowledge gleaned by having become an axolotl himself, learns that they stay so still so as to make the time pass easier.
And he continues returning like this for an indeterminate stretch of days and weeks, aware that the ticket taker and guards think he's crazy, and stares at the axolotls.
The narrator looks the creatures up in the library at Sainte Geneviève and learns about their taxonomy, geographical origin, and historical uses in food and medicine, but the facts and figures fail to capture his attention the way the creatures themselves do, so he returns the next day to stare at them some more. The axolotls' eyes are totally different, without pupils or irises, a solid gold color that speaks "of the presence of a different life, of another way of seeing" (6). Of the fish, he says, "the simple stupidity of their handsome eyes so similar to our own" (that is, human eyes), suggests to him nothing noteworthy or interesting to glean about their existence. The other animals there don't impress the narrator. He rides his bike to the zoo and, finding the lions in a sad state and the panthers asleep, decides to venture into the aquarium. The narrator describes his first encounter with the axolotls. With this declaration, the narrator then charts his growing obsession with the amphibians up to the moment of his abrupt transformation. In the first lines of the story, the narrator declares that after observing the axolotls so closely, he has actually become an axolotl. The first story of the collection, "Axolotl," follows an unnamed first-person narrator who becomes obsessed with observing the axolotls in the aquarium exhibit of the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.
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