Literary Elements In Perfume

It is very common for authors to use a variety of literary elements in their work to produce an effect for readers. For instance, in Perfume: The Story of a Murder, the author Patrick Suskind uses different techniques to serve different purposes. The story of Perfume is set in eighteenth century France, and follows the journey of a man who murders young and innocent girls for their scent: Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. Suskind is able to communicate a message to his readers and make clear the moral of the story. Through his use of setting, symbolism, and minor characters Suskind shows social, racial and class differences in Perfume: The Story of Murderer.
To begin with, Suskind relies heavily on his use of setting in his novel Perfume to show social differences in his story Perfume. Perfume takes place in France during the eighteenth century. This time period is also known as the Age of Reason, a time when “individuals had freedom to pursue happiness, and it is said to be the beginning of an open society”. In the story, people, including Grenouille himself, began to make their own theories of existence. In the first page of the novel, Suskind

They are said to be the famous black guards who possessed arrogance, misanthropy, immortality, or wickedness. Suskind stated, “if his[Grenouille’s] name-in contrast to the names of other gifted abominations, de Sade’s, for instance, or Saint-Just’s, Fbuche’s, Bonaparte’s, etc.-has been forgotten today, it is certainly not because Grenouille fell short of those more famous blackguards when it came to arrogance, misanthropy, immorality, or, more succinctly, to wickedness, but because his gifts and his sole ambition were restricted to a domain that leaves no traces in history: to the fleeting realm of scent” (pg. 3). Suskind also mentions many aspects of society in France through stench. Suskind stated, “there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women.