ANALYSIS
From chapter 35 until the end of the novel Perfume there were many moments where the messages and themes of the story were embedded below the surface of the text. The three examples that I found, where the theme and message of the story was revealed were on page 236, page 252 and page 255.
On the second paragraph of page 237 a message is given as it says, “And yet-it was not he either, it could not be he, he could not be a murderer. The man who stood at the scaffold was innocence personified. All of them-from the bishop to the lemonade vendor, from the marquis to the, little washer woman, from the presiding judge to the street urchin-knew it in a flash.” In this paragraph the crowd who has come to watch Grenouille be executed has smelled his perfume and now they believe that he is innocent. The message that the author is trying to send is how something as strong as perfume can deceive many people through their scent. The author is trying to show the readers that smell is one of the most important senses.
At the beginning of page 252 the author was revealing a message related to power and success as it says, “There was only one thing that power could not do: it could not make him able to smell himself. And though his perfume might allow him to appear before the world as god-if he could not smell himself and thus never know who he was, to hell with it, with the world, with himself, with his perfume.” The message in this paragraph is that power and success in life is useless if you appear powerful to others around you but to your own self, appear as nothing because you don’t know who you truly are. The author Patrick Suskind is trying to show this message to the readers through the character Grenouille. For instance, Grenouille can easily control people through this perfume that he has created, but to him it is useless because everyone around him has a scent except for him. The author didn’t give the character Grenouille a scent for a...