Perfume Patrick Suskind
Perfume by Patrick Suskind is the story of an ingenious murderer with a superhuman sense of smell. Although Jean-Baptiste Grenouille could dissect every scent known to man he lacked a scent of his own a scent, he felt that without a scent he was not an individual in society. In the chosen passage, Grenouille has left Paris in pursuit of his dream; to create liquid forms of the wonderful perfumes he had created in his mind. However on his journey the scent of nature captures him, Grenouille became disgusted with the scent of humans and continues to distance himself from all civilization, going into complete isolation. For seven years Grenouille stayed in seclusion until he had a dream that frightened him and made him question his own scent. Grenouille wakes up from this dream and Suskind brilliantly describes Grenouille’s terror on page 133 and 134 in the novel.
Suskind uses changes in atmosphere to create suspense throughout these two pages. Suskind starts page 133 with; “It was not an external catastrophe at all, but an internal one……it blocked Grenouille’s favorite means of escape”. Suskind then goes on to paint a peaceful picture of Grenouille in the reader’s mind, “he lay in the purple salon and slept”, which provides contrast to the paragraph above which speaks of a catastrophe. This immediately causes the reader to assume that this peace will not last and the catastrophe will create a sudden change in atmosphere, creating suspense. Suskind builds on this tension by describing in detail Grenouille’s dream. “For his sleep…..was not dreamless but threaded with ghostly wisps of dreams”, “at first they merely floated in thin threads past Grenouille’s nose, but then they grew thicker and more cloud like.” Suskind then speaks of the scent in the dream as a fog and presents a problem for Grenouille. “Grenouille was completely wrapped in fog….. if he did not want to suffocate he would have to breathe the fog in”. The...