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Patrick Suskind's Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer

847 Words4 Pages

Patrick Suskind, the author of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, writes a riveting story about a wonderfully talented boy, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, and his tragic journey through life which is infused with psychotic episodes. Jean-Baptiste’s journey can be further investigated by applying Carl Jung’s concept of archetype in his theory of the human psyche where he believes that archetypes reside within the “collective unconscious” of people all over the world. One such archetypal situation is observed throughout the book, which highlights Jean-Baptiste’s Loss of Innocence, his Resurrection, which is ultimately followed by his Unhealable Wound. Jean-Baptiste is always seen losing a fraction of his innocence throughout the span of his childhood. He is borne of a mother who commits infanticide, at a …show more content…

“I’ll hate the notion that I failed to recognize an olfactory genius” (Suskind, 32) After discovering Grenouille’s talent for perfumery and creating exquisite scents, Baldini, a waning Master Perfumer purchases Grenouille and frees him from the tanners tyranny. Baldini trains Grenouille, teaching him the practice of distillation, and how to preserve scents. “By the end he was distilling plain water from the Siene. The distinctive odor of which seemed to him work preventing” (Suskind, 33). He looks after Grenouille’s health as well as mental state of being, and attends to him when he falls sick. His bond with Grenouille denotes a father-son relationship, and this is perhaps why Baldini stops taking Grenouille for granted, and eventually starts regarding Grenouille as his apprentice, as well as a possible heir to his shop. Grenouille’s resurrection from his former life to his current blossoming state of living is recognized as another archetype, which further solidifies Jung’s theory of archetype’s influencing the “ collective unconscious” of

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