I- Centricity: Author and Authorship in Ancient Narrative

An ‘unreliable’ narrator becomes a problem when reliability is seen as the essential criterion for establishing the concrete connection between the author of the novel and the novel itself. The paper examines the connection between the historical Apuleius and his major work, the Metamorphoses, on the level of the plot looking for possible overlapping of the narrating voice and the author’s voice in the narrative. This examination gives rise to a wide range of questions, and problems. If decoding the personality of the author in his fictional voice is fundamental in order to understand his work, Apuleius has deliberately confused voices and narrative schemes, refusing to offer a stable point of view. Finally, the famous question whether the Metamorphoses are simply a collection of short stories written with no purpose but entertainment or covers a deeper meaning is confronted in the light of the unstable narrator.