The Golden Ass | Style

The Golden Ass Style

Point of View

The book is written from the first-person perspective, though much of the story consists of various sub-narratives, told by other characters in the story. As the story is told in the first-person, knowledge is generally confined to what Lucius himself could know, though Apuleius seems to bend this rule at times. It is not clear, for example, how Lucius knows the details surrounding the prisoner-woman's past crime in Chapter 16.

One of the purposes for using the first-person perspective is to be able to make Lucius' ultimate religious conversion more personal and easier to relate with for the reader. The reader is able to have access to Lucius' thoughts and emotions in a way that would not be possible if the narrator were a mere observer. Apuleius actually does a very effective job of immersing the reader in Lucius' perspective. The seventeen chapters leading up to his moral conversion depict...
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