The most reasonable explanation for this would be that the keeper had unlocked the ring, removed it from the elephant’s leg, and locked the ring again… despite the fact that the keeper had no key. (457)
This story is told from the first person, retrospective point of view. The narrator holds a factual retelling of the case of the vanishing elephant with an intelligent, suspicious tone. This is a creative narration in the story due to the fact that the speaker talks directly to the audience when reciting lists of facts from the news articles which went over the elephant case. However, because most of the dialogue is seeming to be directly to the reader, it is actually the thoughts the narrator is having, creating the information to be unreliable.
The biggest confusion for the Japanese town, and for the speaker, was how the chained elephant escaped the cage with out unlocking the cuff on its ankle. People yearned for an explanation for the phenomenon for the elephant they idolized. The narrator’s life shifts during the retelling of the elephant case, as well as his environment with the building of new condos everywhere in the town. He emphasizes that the things around him have lost their proper balance in describing the keeper growing or the elephant shrinking. The elephant case is a parallel to his life, and his search for an explanation of the unbalanced environment he was coming to live in.