Pedro Paramo Essay

The novel Perfume written by Patrick Suskind displays a strange, yet fresh character named Grenouille and his journey through a hard and unloving childhood, which leads him to become very isolated from society as a whole. The passage, which can be found on pages 116-117, describe how Grenouille begins to slowly isolate himself. Grenouille has recently left Baldini his former master and headed towards Orleans to find other ways of making perfumes. As he gets further and further from Paris, he finds that he can breather better and smoother then he could before. He realizes that the reason is that, there are not as many scents to catch out in the wilderness as there are in a dense and closed in city. This is when he decides to take a little detour to Orleans and avoid any and all people along his path.

Grenouille wants to avoid any sort of city or any people because in the wilderness, he can breathe easily, without the worry of coming along a scent he will not be able to resist. Suskind portrays Grenouille like this because, there is never a moment someone isn't thinking about or trying to avoid the stresses of life and wanting to escape society and people. Suskind wants to show that Grenouille going away and hiding in the wilderness, is the exact metaphor for everybodys "escape", a place where they can breathe easy, think clearly, and feel relaxed without the stress of the near pending future.

Humanity and its scent is what Grenouille realizes that he wants to escape, not the world but the people in it. Suskind displays Grenouille like this simply to show how people sometimes think of one another. How we all at onetime or another think that the world would be a better place without the people living in it. The world would be void of any trace of disturbance or as to Grenouille void of any dense scents, which are the things Suskind wants us to recognize as the pressure and stress of society.

The effect of the passage on pages 116-117 is simply to make one realize ones secret desire of the world without the pressures of society and how total isolation from humanity would benefit ones life and relive ones soul. Suskind's purpose was to show people that total isolation from society and humanity is possibly and that it is ok to let one think about their quiet, yet very possibly desires.