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The opening pages of the story reveal the narrator to be a highly pragmatic person who values routine, order, logic, and unity. With a fixed daily routine, the narrator ensures there will be no surprises. His alarm is set for 6:13 and he enjoys the same breakfast every day, which suggests a particularity that borders on eccentric. Rather than skim headlines and read the articles that interest him, the narrator reads the entire newspaper cover to cover each morning. These rigid habits reveal a man who wants to know everything there is to know, and in the order he considers to be most logical. Everything he does, from the numbered lists he makes to the scrapbook he meticulously keeps, suggests a person who seeks to understand the logic in everything. For the narrator, everything has an explanation and the more pragmatic something is, the better it is.

Because the narrator values order and logic, he becomes obsessed with and profoundly affected by the elephant’s disappearance. Based on his detailed knowledge of the facts and impeccable deductive reasoning, the narrator arrives at an impossible conclusion: the elephant has simply vanished. It is the only explanation that makes any sense, and yet the narrator knows that things cannot just disappear into thin air. The conflict between the narrator’s need for order and logic and the apparently illogical disappearance of the elephant changes the narrator. The paradox eats away at him and begins to break down his sense of reality. Importantly, it also creates an imbalance that alienates him from others, as seen by the lack of understanding he receives from the editor, whom the narrator hoped would lend a sympathetic ear. By the end of the story, the elephant’s disappearance causes the narrator to lose interest in life. He no longer has preferences and lacks motivation. His narration itself becomes bleak. The short, flat, final sentences of the story hint at a man who no longer sees the meaning in a strange world where an elephant can just disappear.

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