The Manipulation of Reality in Works by Heinrich von Kleist

Disguising and unveiling, only to disguise again, Heinrich von Kleist creates characters whose definition of self and of others depends on their own ability to generate, present, and regenerate convincing masks of personal and interpersonal realities. This study focuses on the network of private and public identities in Kleist's works, how those identities function on and between transformative levels of human interaction (role-playing, creative naming, word-dreams, and manipulative games of illusion and delusion), and how those identities in the imaginative consciousness fabricate new universes which become part of and, at the same time, are separated from the temporal and spatial norms we assign to external realities.