Children in "Perfume"

1784 Words8 Pages
Jean-Baptiste Grenouille was born in a situation which is so different to what we usually expect from a “normal” birth that it shocks anyone who reads it. From the first chapter, Patrick Süskind concentrates very much on describing the smell of the period in which the story is taking place. Since smell is an abstract noun, describing it can be complicated and Süskind uses another abstract noun to describe the smell. The repetition of “stench” in the second paragraph of the novel intensifies the idea of the horrible smell and it is repeated so many times that it seems to be the only thing important about the period which Süskind is describing. After this long repetition of “stench” and “stank”, a stative verb which reflects the smell’s lack of progress, Paris is mentioned for the first time as where “the stench was foulest”. And in the city where the stench was foulest, “there was a spot in Paris under the sway of a particularly fiendish stench”. Süskind builds up a semantic field of foul smell which leads to the place where Grenouille was born. The description of where he was born, at the Cimetière des Innocents where “For eight hundred years the dead had been brought”, is the opposite of where we would imagine a mother giving birth. It is also described as the “most putrid spot in the whole kingdom”. The use of hyperbole gives an undeserved importance to both the place and the birth of Grenouille. Süskind also does this by comparing him to de Sade, Saint-Just, Fouché and Bonaparte at the beginning of the chapter. However, we become aware that Grenouille’s birth was not the first to occur in that place or in that way. Grenouille’s mother wanted to “put this revolting birth behind her as quickly as possible” right there in the middle of the fish booth, where she had done the same with her other five children. In the sentence “She had effected all the others here”,
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