Two Of The Shortest, and frequently least highly regarded,1 of Kleist’s short stories, “Das Bettelweib von Locarno” and “Die heilige Cäcilie oder die Gewalt der Musik,” will be used here as exemplary narratives for the establishment of a narrative paradigm. Both stories reflect what is a readily discernible feature of all the narratives, namely a clear tripartite structure along the lines of drama2 featuring an exposition, an unfolding and development of themes in a central or middle section, and a denouement or resolution marked by a return to the issue(s) foreshadowed in the exposition (see NK). This structure provides the paradigmatic lines that give the texts a sense of cohesion. Beyond this, the structure indicates a clear three-fold division of the text, whereby separate but related narrative units discharge their function sequentially. Each section, as these narrative units will be called, either establishes or tests a proposition suggested or implied in the story’s exposition. This proposition is tied, implicitly in these two shorter stories but explicitly in the remaining six (by and large) longer narratives, to the question of a central contract whose validity is at issue in the texts.

The idea of a contract is a seminal one in Kleist’s short stories and is conceived of in terms of Rousseau’s rationalistic account of contractualism in Du contrat social. It is argued that the relationships between the characters in Kleist’s stories are described by, and depend upon, the notion of a contract and that, beyond the state of nature, relationships are governed by a contractualist understanding within the society the individual embraces. According to Rousseau, the social contract is to bring about “a form of association that will defend and protect the person and goods of each associate with the full common force, and by means of which each, uniting with all, nevertheless obey only himself and remain as free as before” (SC, 49–50). Such a form is the social contract and is defined thus: “Each of us puts his person and his full power in common under the supreme direction of the general will; and in a body we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole” (SC, 50).