The Baker Character Analysis

The baker is yet another cruel owner of Lucius (as a donkey). He forces Lucius to do mill work. Like many characters, he has an unfaithful partner. The baker tells his spouse, the baker’s wife, a story about the fuller and the fuller’s wife, where unfaithfulness has dire consequences, particularly for the fuller’s wife’s lover. Ultimately, the baker catches his own wife cheating and divorces her, but the baker’s wife plots revenge and finds a witch, who seems to send the ghost of a murdered woman to visit the baker. Ultimately, the baker ends up dead under circumstances that look like suicide but which seem to involve the ghost that the witch sent to him. The baker embodies the complex relationship between stories and reality in The Golden Ass: he tells one story, only to end up as a character in another one. He represents the complex ways that humans, and particularly people in relationships, plot against each other.