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Perfume Character Analysis

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Ortega 2 This essay examines the research question “To What Extent is Patrick Suskind’s Characterization of His Protagonist Significant in Criticizing the Society in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer?” The purpose of this essay is to analyze the characterization of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille in correlation with 18th century France. In the novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Patrick Suskind presents Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, who is characterized as less than human. Grenouille was left to die by his mother and was taken in by the church, where they paid for him to be raised by a woman called Madame Gaillard. After the parish stopped paying Madame Gaillard, she gave Grenouille to Grimal the Tanner to work as an apprentice. With every encounter, those …show more content…

As a child and growing up, Grenouille always had a difficult time finding himself because with no smell to him, Grenouille was an outcast to society and was always perceived as peculiar. Grenouille went on a journey to find himself, which began working in Baldini’s shop. Baldini taught Grenouille how to make a perfume properly, which led to Grenouille’s desire for the scent and the fact that he need scents to survive. As his obsession with scent began to grow, he enjoyed finding new ways to satisfy his obsession. Grenouille found he enjoyed the diminished human scents the further he walked from Paris and so Grenouille began to avoid people completely as he enjoyed the purity of the new air. Grenouille wanted to get where humans could no longer be smelled, “Grenouille no longer wanted to go somewhere, but only to go away, away from human beings” (Suskind 117). This need led Grenouille to live in a cave, which further developed his search for human identity and eventually, Grenouille finds joy as he remains in solitude and considers his cave a “blessed region” (Suskind 121). One night, Grenouille had a nightmare where he had a personal smell which could not

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