‘The Elephant Vanishes” is told in first-person. The narrator relays the events that involve the elephant: how the elephant vanishes, how he saw the elephant shrink, and how the disappearance affects the narrator.
“The elephant’s absence had first been noticed at two o’clock on the afternoon of May 18–the day before–when men from the school-lunch company delivered their their usual truckload of food (the elephant mostly ate leftovers from the lunches of children in the local elementary school).
This disappearance affects the narrator in a strange way. It causes the narrator to try to figure out how the elephant vanish. He becomes obsessed with the elephant. So obsessed that when meets a woman that he is interested in, he brings up the elephant’s disappearance.
“You were carrying on a perfectly normal conversion with me until a couple of minutes–at least until the subject of the elephant came up”