The main reason Cortázar uses the axolotl as a focus for his story is that it is one of the few species in nature that dies before completing its metamorphosis; it reproduces during its larval stage, and thus is a curious example within the natural world of an incomplete life-form. (When the Austrian scientist Alexander von Humboldt brought the first specimen from Mexico to Paris in the nineteenth century, the discovery that it could reproduce in its larval stage caused a sensation in the scientific world.) The axolotl’s incomplete metamorphosis also makes it appropriate for Cortázar’s story: Stunted in its growth, it mirrors the human mind trapped within a body and forced to a basic, “animal” level of existence.