SOURCE: "Das Erbeben in Chili—Die Verlobung in St. Domingo," in Heinrich von Kleist: The Dramas and Stories, Berg, 1994, pp. 194-211.

In the excerpt below, Stephens provides a thematic comparison of Das Erdbeben in Chili" and "Die Verlobung in St. Domingo. "

"Das Erdbeben in Chili" was the first of Kleist's stories to be published, being completed by autumn 1806, and may well have been the first to be thought out. There is no way of knowing whether any experiments in narrative form preceded it, and source studies have been characteristically unrewarding as far as the main plot is concerned. Kleist's control of complex narrative form in his first published story is even more astonishing than his precocity as a dramatist in Die Familie Schroffenstein, finished in 1802. By the time he wrote "Das Erdbeben in Chili," he had been through the long battle to resolve the problems of tragic form...