Perfume Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Perfume - Essay Example ty and fantasy into one credible and believable tale, especially when the book has been originally published during a period dominated by rational thinking and the Enlightenment. In Perfume’s Grenouille, a character is created who is repulsive and ugly but that he had an uncanny skill to recognize beauty more than most. The characterization is very realistic, with Suskind painstakingly depicting the period and setting including the norms, prevailing philosophies, and so forth, making his fantastic claim about Grenouille’s uncanny olfactory ability believable. Grenouille’s apprenticeship, for instance, demonstrated the fidelity by which the author described the commercial system in France during the period. Then, there was the information about the odor of a female virgin as one with potential to capture the very smell of desirability. Another case in point is the scrutiny on Grenouille in the eyes of the pseudo-scientist Marquis de la Taillade-Espinasse, who opined that the poor man’s spotted and scarred body is caused by the corruptive effects of gases on the body (141). The notion was of course silly, but that given how ugly Gre nouille’s body looked, such depiction, in some perverse way, seem to actually make sense. Together, these information demonstrated the interplay of what is realistic and what is fictitious and that it is strong enough for Suskind to suggest a certain man without any odor whatsoever, and his readers certainly believed it is the most natural thing in the world. All in all, such device was employed in order to effectively present Perfume is about fairness – meting out punishment for bad deeds committed. It is actually a classically structured horror literature in the tradition of crime genre, glossed over by employing a unique narrative approach. Grenouille committed his killing spree and in the end, the very reason for his murders was what caused his destruction as well – poetic justice. But if one paid closer attention,