54 pages • 1 hour read
Patrick SüskindPerfume: The Story of a Murderer
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1985A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 23-28Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapters 23-25 Summary
Leaving Paris, Grenouille discovers that the air outside the city in the countryside is far cleaner and purer. In Paris, there lived over half a million people, and walking now in the country, he realizes that it is not the city but the people there who seem so oppressive. Coming to this realization, he resolves to avoid all cities and villages when he can, content to simply walk cross-country, traveling by night. “The more Grenouille had become accustomed to purer air, the more sensitive he was to human odor” (122), and so as time goes on, he searches out the greatest possible solitude, as far away from human beings as he can possibly travel.
He settles on an isolated area above a dormant volcano, the Plomb du Cantal, with a peak that rises over 6,000 feet. Reaching the mountain in mid-August 1756, he realizes that no matter how hard he might try, he cannot detect even the slightest hint of human odor. He is totally free from any human influence: “He was truly completely alone! He was the only human being in the world! He erupted with thundering jubilation” (125).
Settling into his new abode, he finds water and a small amount of food that is readily available in the wild, content to subsist purely on what he can scavenge: “whenever he felt hungry, had wolfed down anything vaguely edible that had crossed his path” (126). For shelter, he decides to make do with a cave at the back of a tunnel that leads straight into the heart of the mountain. At the back of the cave, deep under the earth, he feels secure, and he ends up spending the majority of each day in the dark, lying in silence and perfectly still. His purpose is simply to be alone.
Part 2, Chapters 26-28 Summary
While in his cave, Grenouille spends his time in flights of imagination, recalling and savoring all the memories of his most cherished odors and sensory experiences. Imagining himself to be a kind of God, he roams the earth in his imagination spreading his gifts and presence across the whole earth, perfectly pleased with himself in the depths of his own mind. Envisioning his inner self to possess a “purple castle” of a heart, this castle contains the memories of all the scents he collected through the course of his life, imagining them as casks of fine wine with which he can satisfy his thirst and every whim.
One day, he imagines himself uncorking the bottle containing the scent of the girl with the plums, drinking deeply, and inebriating himself to the point of unconsciousness. Upon waking, however, he is startled and hyperventilating. Slowly he drags himself to water in an attempt to calm himself, only gradually calming down and finding peace. This routine goes on for a period of seven years, summer through winter and back again. “One winter during this period, Grenouille almost froze to death, without ever noticing it” (137), and he would have been content to remain in the mountain until the day of his death. This was not to be, for one day at the end of his seven-year sojourn, Grenouille is met with catastrophe.
Part 2, Chapters 23-28 Analysis
Once Grenouille leaves the employ of Baldini, he abandons humanity entirely. While his initial intention is to immediately head to the city of Grasse, where the finest perfuming techniques were being practiced, he almost immediately realizes his hatred of all that is human. For the first time in his life, he leaves human civilization, and as he gets further and further away from Paris, he realizes that the air is purer: “For the first time he could almost breathe freely, did not constantly have to be on the olfactory lookout” (119). What he despised was not actually the city but the people in the city. There are at least two reasons for Grenouille’s hatred of other people. The first is the most obvious: Human beings smell. The reader is told time and time again how Grenouille greatly dislikes the smell of human beings, and he describes the feeling of being stuck in a crowd as “the nauseating press of living human beings” (36). Human odor is also one of the many things that set Grenouille apart from others; he is thought to be inhuman and possibly demonic because he has no odor. With this, the scent of humans is a source of Grenouille’s alienation. The second reason is more subtle and will continue to leak out in drips as the story progresses: Grenouille has a very deep-seated sense of self-loathing. While this is only explicitly revealed later in the novel, it is clear already in Grenouille’s nightmares that his hatred of humanity must be, at the same time, self-hatred. Grenouille has been treated with contempt by everyone he meets, and he has internalized that alienation and loneliness into self-loathing, even as he feels superior and even godlike compared to others.
This hatred of all that is human leads him to avoid human habitation on his journey—careful to protect his “newfound respiratory freedom” (120)—and eventually leads him to abandon all notion of making his way to Grasse and becoming a secular hermit of sorts, taking up residence in a mountain cave. Grenouille’s desire for solitude completely overtakes any desire he possessed to discover and perfect his position within the perfume industry. All he desires now is to delight in his solitude, “to cradle himself in the soothing belief that he was alone in a world bathed in darkness or the cold light of the moon” (122).
Upon reaching the mountain and realizing that he can’t smell humans, he is overwhelmed with delight: “He had escaped the abhorrent taint! He was truly completely alone! He was the only human being in the world!” (125). In this newfound ecstasy of solitude, Grenouille turns wholly inward and abandons not just human civilization and interaction but any acknowledgment of reality outside his own mind. Content to lick the moisture off the cave walls for hydration, Grenouille retreats into the recesses of his imagination, into his “innermost empire” (128), locking himself away with his memories: “He had withdrawn solely for his own personal pleasure, only to be near to himself” (128). What he was never able to experience or enjoy in the real world—true pleasures and genuine release of emotions—he can now simulate with the power of his mind. In this total solitude, he can transform his alienation into a sense of superiority via isolation; he is not just separate, but above. The foreshadowed catastrophe, however, will be the catalyst for his murderous impulses. Apart from the singular instance of killing the girl with the plums, Grenouille’s homicidal impulses have been dormant or suppressed. In short, this period of Alienation and Search for Personal Identity leads Grenouille to discover his worst impulses and sets the stage for his future crimes.
