A Moveable Feast

by Ernest Hemingway

A Moveable Feast: Unreliable Narrator 1 key example

Paris Sketches: On Writing in the First Person
Explanation and Analysis—Memory and Experience:

While this book is useful for understanding some of the autobiographical details that influenced Hemingway's fiction, Hemingway is an admittedly unreliable narrator who mixes up fact and fiction. In Paris Sketches: On Writing in the First Person, he claims that by assuming the perspective of whatever person or character he is writing about, he can easily convince readers that he is offering a true, first-hand account:

If you do this successfully enough, you make the person who is reading [your stories] believe that the things happened to him too. If you can do this you are beginning to get what you are trying for, which is to make something that will become a part of the reader’s experience and a part of his memory. There must be things that he did not notice when he read the story or the novel which, without his knowing it, enter into his memory and experience so that they are a part of his life.