While reading the story “The Elephant Vanishes,” we as readers never get the answer to the questions of why the narrator is so interested in the elephant and how it started initially. He mentions on page 454 that he had his own “private interest in the elephant problem from the very outset. . .” but he never goes into why. He keeps every article pertain to the beast and went to see it on a weekly basis and he admitted to seeing it the night it went missing. Why did it affect his life so much? This question is never addressed in the story and it bugs me personally because it reads like he just woke up one day and discovered he developed an interest in this elephant. I do understand why it would be interesting at the start as it isn’t every day an elephant gets moved into a city with no zoo, but to become interested to the point of keeping multiple scrapbooks with every single newspaper article ever printed from the start and going to visit it every weekend is a mystery to me. We as readers can assume that he has at least a mild form of obsessive compulsive disorder from how he reads every newspaper article starting from the very beginning and how he can remember even the minutest of details regarding the events in the story, but what was the initial spark as to why become obsessed with the elephant?
I guess some questions are just not meant to be answered. . .