Also present as a theme in this story is the notion of unease with the human body. In an essay on the short story and its environment published in 1969, Cortázar explains how writing serves as an exorcism for him, a way of “casting out invading creatures,” and this seems to fit “Axolotl” in the sense that it appears to exorcise a feeling of nausea created by a sense of entrapment within the clumsy heaviness of the human body. “Axolotl” is gripping precisely because it speaks to its readers about a more elemental feeling, that of the soul being trapped within a body, or spirit being trapped within matter. This is an archetypal idea to which many religions have appealed.