Candidate name: Anitej Mukund Menon

Candidate number: 003869-0005

How was your understanding of cultural and contextual considerations of the work developed
through your interactive oral?

Reading the novel ‘Perfume’ has increased my understanding of the impact of immorality and
discrimination in a society and how the discrimination depicted in this Bildungsroman serves as a
reflection of the flaws of the real world around us. Grenouille, the protagonist of the novel, is repeatedly
subjected to being looked down upon by Pairsians based upon the one fact that he was different from
the rest of the society. There are many characters presented in this darkly humorous fable who are
shown to be intolerant towards Grenouille and treat him unfairly for no fault of his.

Over the course of the novella, I couldn’t help but notice the many similarities drawn up
between how the Parisians treated Grenouille for being different from the norm and how modern
society around us today tends to treat something that they don’t fully understand. I, as a reader,
could subconsciously pick up on the stark comparisons that Suskind makes between the society
around us in the twentieth and twenty-first century and the Parisians in the eighteenth century.

From the other orphans in Madam Gaillard’s parish in his childhood days to the many people
who employed him(including Grimal and Baldini) ,I could understand that Grenouille was always
treated with scorn and in the initial chapters, this negative view of society towards the boy was made
clear to me, as a reader, when the other orphan children in Madame Gaillard’s establishment saw his
‘sinister presence’ and tended to single him out and in the world I have grown up in, society is not all
that different. I have come across many stories about how certain children have been singled out and
are the victims of bullying. What Suskind has shown me, as his reader, is no different. In the story, I
understood how the general public were wary of Grenouille and shunned him away simply because
he had no smell of his own; because he was different, unique, out-of-the-ordinary. They looked down
at him as if he was a sinister creature not because of what he did , but because of who he was, being
the person who lacked any sort of scent of himself. Many critics consider this book to be simply a
fantasy but it means a lot more than that to me.