Scent and Smell in Perfume by Patrick Süskind

865 Words2 Pages

In Patrick Süskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer the motif of scent and smell plays a huge role in the plot development of the novel; perhaps, it is the primary driving force behind it. Throughout the book, this motif is woven through the text as its own separate entity that pertains to the essential theme of the novel: olfaction. Süskind’s placement of the enhancement of smell brings Grenouille closer to the readers for the very fact that he is dehumanized by it. The technique of the author in using this motif is graceful in a manner that its presence does not display redundancy; rather it causes the reader to yearn each time it is shown for how the motif ties into the story holistically.
Süskind’s first display of “knitting” this motif into the text is through the dehumanization of the protagonist Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. Within the first few pages of the book, this dehumanization is shown through the figure that brought Grenouille into the world: his mother. Due to her current circumstances, she does not even claim Grenouille and his siblings to be “real children” (p.5). For the very fact that they are illegitimate, no father is present in the home, and her inability to support them provokes her decision to deem them as fake. Although this scene does not pertain to the motif directly, Süskind utilizes this quote as the inception of the perpetual inhumane treatment of Grenouille his heightened olfaction capabilities.
The first use of this motif is when Grenouille’s childhood caregivers realize that he has no personal scent. The scene in which Father Terrier denigrates Jean Bussie for claiming that Grenouille is possessed by some demon portray since he has no personal scent shows how infants were treated as incomplete hum...

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...ncurrently reversing it on his victims. Giving Laure the attribute of having sap dehumanizes her to the fullest extent. This foreshadows Grenouille’s future murder victims as simply inhumane prey, nothing more. In this same passage, Süskind reveals just how finely tuned Grenouille’s hyperosmia really is. A year before when he was in Grasse, her scent was “sprinkled and dappled about” (p.190) but now, it is “a faint, smooth stream of scent that shimmered” (190). However, Grenouille then goes on to envisage the pinnacle of her scent to being “just twelve more months” and then he would be able to “imprison the wild flow of its scent” (p. 190). Süskind reveals in this passage – as well as the other murders- that Grenouille’s fondness of the scent of red-haired prepubescent girls not only portrays his disdain for humanity, but his lack of veneration for women as well.

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