The literary narrative certainly opens unimaginable possibilities for both, reader and author, in their daily routines. The imagination enters the scene here and conceives numerous possibilities of meanings, therefore restraining the specificity of the fictional literary speech, which stands out for conceiving in its form the imaginary theme. The formulation of the literary work is then concerned to literature. As an imaginary speech it gives back the difference to the individual (subject), and not just simple expectations. From this concept, the present study takes Rachel de Queiroz’s novel, O Quinze, as an object of analysis. The author does not realize the drought of 1915, therefore allowing the reader to bring the imaginary into action in which the physical endurance and suffering act on the individual, building up, or even affirming, his character. Our research emphasizes on the existence of an alternate path for working the historiography from the fictional books. In one hand, this study focuses the non-document character of literature, an in other the possibility of working with a fictional book from its functionality. From this perspective we do not intend to find full identities in a literary work. The characters of a fictional work are constantly in build up process. They are, therefore, unfinished, ready to be and to become recalled in the act of reading. Rachel de Queiroz doesn’t create an identity for the typical inland man called nordestino, but an individual who, going through rough situations, could become another and various others. The drought reality beyond the written text is not realized in the novel, but makes possible the realization of an imaginary of the drought and of its inland individual, the nordestino. This way, in the text, we experience alterity.