This study attempts to clarify the nature of the relationship of power and narrative in novelistic imagination through a reading of Edward Said, whose work represented a turning point in western criticism and founded post-colonial discourse. Imperial discourse is used in this study to mean the narrative imagination that was, as Said explained in Culture and Imperialism, implicated in reinforcing the western imperial vision of the world, particularly in the context of the British and French Empires, which were governed by an ideological mode implicit in its conceptions of the non-European “other” living on the periphery in the imperial margin. This mode found its foundation in the internalization of an imperial epistemology and its conceptions concerning the superiority and centrality of western culture and the inferiority and marginality of other peoples. Among the effects of this implicit mode was the implication of the novelistic imagination in the production of prejudiced images and representations, despite the aesthetic metaphors it is girded with and that make it seem unimplicated in the cultural and historical consolidation of the imperial project.