Real and unreal

Here again we find not only the same language but also--and more amazingly--the same context: more writing about writing, a metafictional debate with an imaginary critic of the narrative in progress.

I read to him my day’s experiences.  He listened impatiently; and at last broke out—

“You are incorrigible!  Do you call that abstraction, the real?”   

--Scenes Beyond the Western Border, August 1853; and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army (1857)

... a reply must in civility be made to a certain voice which methinks I hear, that, in view of past chapters, and more particularly the last, where certain antics appear, exclaims: "How unreal all this is!"  --The Confidence-Man (1857)

Did I say "metafictional"? Maurice S. Lee's word "metacritical" is good, too--maybe better since we're talking about ongoing criticism and criticism of criticism in supposed non-fiction, a military memoir.

--Maurice S. Lee on Skepticism and The Confidence-Man, from The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville

"... The Confidence-Man with its metacritical asides purposefully punctures verisimilitude."

Scenes Beyond the Western Border
Southern Literary Messenger 19 (August 1853)