Abstract: For the Goncourt brothers, imagination is another facet of reality. The dream world that they paint is strongly linked to reality. In Charles Demailly as in En 18.., the dream finds its execution in the current life of the character. It reveals either the passion or the fear of the man of letters. The nocturnal dream betrays the perception of the characters that phenomenology could explain to us. At the same time, the reverie that allows the protagonist to escape the harshness of reality becomes a springboard to reveal the aesthetic dream of novelists, the ideal of a style embodied in “artist writing”.
