Impressions

Axolotl - Julio Cortazar

This is a descriptive piece, where the author brings our attention to the voice of the narrator, and then swaps the characters and the voice simultaneously. Curiously, I didn't know the gender of the narrator, until after the shift, when the fish starts refering to the original narrator with a masculine pronoun. I believe there was nothing in the story that divulges the gender of the original narrator. I am sure this was not by design, and doesn't play to the main point of the story, but in the reading of it, I was startled by the shift of voices and my discovery of the narrator's gender. Do the axolotl have a gender? What gender is the author now?