Readers of Kleist are Familiar with the two types of violence that structure the endings of his stories. On the one hand, there is an imposition of narrative closure, of an end that seems highly artificial and discontinuous with respect to the events leading up to it. Consider, for instance, the final paragraph in “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo,” which commemorates a betrothal that has never taken place; or the unlikely happy end of “Die Marquise von O…,” or the fairy-tale-like reference to Kohlhaas’s “frohe und rüstige Nachkommen.” Now this forced ending is always preceded by or intertwined with another, explicitly physical kind of violence, which also constitutes an end of sorts. We might think here of Gustav’s killing of Toni in “Die Verlobung,” or of Kohlhaas’s murderous revenge, culminating in his ingestion of the piece of paper containing his enemy’s fortune. The conjugal serialization of rape at the end of the “Marquise” suggested in the “ganze Reihe von jungen Russen” supposed to issue from the marital union perhaps interlaces narrative and physical violence in a single ironic phrase.

But the most egregious and terrifying examples of the violent ending in Kleist clearly occur with the smashing of the skull in “Das Erdbeben in Chili” and “Der Findling.” I speak emphatically of end or ending here because of the stark finality of these acts, of the sense that, once the deed has occurred and the skull is broken, finitude and finality are so indelibly and irrevocably asserted that nothing more would seem to be left to say or do. When the brain of an infant, of a being not yet capable of speech, is splattered across the pillar of a church, language and thought, hence narrative, would seem to have been extinguished. And yet Kleist’s novella not only continues beyond this horrific event but even recasts it, however hypothetically, as a moment of supreme satisfaction and significance.

Why the double ending? Why the juxtaposition of destruction and happy conclusion, physical violence and improbable redemption? Note that the two endings — the breaking of the skull and the imposed narrative closure — stand in a conflictual and even antagonistic relation to each other.