Writing in the great Realist tradition, Verne is an avid consumer of written sources. In a more obvious manner than Flaubert or even Zola, he restates, rewrites or recycles knowledge gleaned in the scientific, geographical and historical reviews of the day, and his narrative style is almost instantly recognizable by its long digressions designed to instruct, to enlighten or to initiate. This pedagogical dimension is clearly in keeping with the aims and objectives of Hetzel's Magasin d’éducation et de récréation in which theVoyages extraordinaires were serialized. However, it also at times takes the novel to the extreme limit of its possibilities, and Verne himself was not the only one to see that, if the function of the novel were to become essentially documentary, informative or indeed scientific, then it would almost certainly be surpassed by other media. In a 1902 interview with the Pittsburgh Gazette, published under the title ‘Le Roman disparaîtra bientôt’, Verne had this apparently pessimistic statement to make about the future of the novel:

Yet even as Verne points to the crisis of confidence which results from extreme Realism and Naturalism in the novel, it is also clear that his own fictions revel in the enchantment of the verbal and that they are anything but ‘threatened’ or even self-conscious. While he sets out to describe and to depict objective realities of the world, Verne finds his tone and his authority as a novelist precisely in the pleasure of verbal creativity which he never shows signs of wishing to surpass. In passages where he is apparently at his most ‘pedagogical’, it is the linguistic exuberance and the fascination of exotic or technical terms which strikes us, or indeed the energetic enumerations and taxonomies. As Michel Butor pointed out, Verne's descriptions are invested with an immense poetic power where the richness and strangeness of words themselves is underlined.