How does Süskind use alienation as a tool to develop the protagonist Jean Baptiste Grenouille?The novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, by Patrick Süskind takes place in the slums densely populated and disgusting 18th century. Paris where the protagonist Jean-Baptiste Grenouille resides as a modest peasant with an incomparable sense of smell that sets him apart from the rest of the world. However, Grenouille is unaffected and endures the trials of brutal peasant life with an iron will, hoping to discover all the scents the world has to offer as his only motivation to live. He wants to be alone to further improve his knowledge of scent capture; Grenouille becomes so alienated and fascinated by the art of capturing scents that he embarks on a quest to concoct the "ultimate perfume" which leads him to commit a series of murders to capture human scent. Süskind, through the obscure life and fine nose of Jean Baptiste, allows readers to explore the concept of alienation and its effects on the development of Jean Baptiste Grenouille's character. Jean Baptiste Grenouille is an alien from birth. Grenouille is abandoned at birth by his fishmonger mother, rejected by his surrogate mothers and wet nurses, and is cast out by the Catholic Church. Everyone involved in the baby's life senses something strange and terrifying about Grenouille, mainly because he doesn't give off any scent of his own. Father Terrier is frightened by Grenouille's early fascination with smell as a baby, and he immediately feels uncomfortable with the child's strange ability to smell through him. Although smell is a primary sense in humans, its general dependence is based on a person's physical characteristics. If young Grenouille could indeed... middle of paper ...... identified him as mean and impassive, he can no longer accept the fact that someone as simple and seemingly ordinary as Grenouille could have committed these violent crimes. On the ground of execution however, Grenouille shows that he is an alien capable of more than humans. Its intoxicating scent from the scent of teenage girls is enough to overwhelm the minds of those present. His alienation from birth to his self-imposed alienation from the world led him to become Frog the Great, fooling the public into believing he was similar to other humans, in order to ultimately captivate the people of Grasse with his sublime perfume concoction. Grenouille however, discovers that the captivation of human feeling and love through his scent is not what he wants, and decides that he has no other purpose for living in the world and ends in his days..