How can literature approach the Algerian tragedy? How can criticism deal with such literature? How can literature at such moments turn a blind eye to its tragic present and engage with the privilege of storytelling and the authenticity of imagination? These are the key questions raised by this study on Algerian literature in the 1990s, which sees that the narrative fabric of all this writing governed by its ability to be read from an objective viewpoint, and the specific subjects it deals with as a result, such as the intellectual and the crisis of the intellectual, the savagery of terrorism, the alienation and biases of exile, and the return to the beginnings of the Islamist surge. Writing, when it has to choose between representation and imagination, may find that representation is the artistic choice that reflects a vision of the function of writing and issues of genre more than it reveals a shortcoming in dealing with the components of writing and imagination.