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, is set in the densely populated and repulsive slums of 18th-century Paris, where the protagonist Jean-Baptiste Grenouille lives as a humble peasant with an incomparable sense of smell that sets him apart from the mass. rest of the world. However, Grenouille is unaffected and endures the hardships of brutal peasant life with an iron will, hoping to discover every scent the world had to offer as his sole motivation to live. He wishes to be alone to further improve his knowledge of catching odors; Grenouille becomes so estranged and fascinated by the art of capturing fragrances that he embarks on a quest to invent the "ultimate perfume" which leads him to commit a series of murders to capture the human scent. Süskind, through Jean Baptiste's dark life and thin nose, allows readers to explore the concept of alienation and the effects it has on Jean Baptiste Grenouille's character development. Jean Baptiste Grenouille is an alien from the moment he is born. Grenouille is abandoned at birth by his fishwife mother, rejected by surrogate mothers and wet nurses, and expelled from the Catholic Church. Every person involved in the child's life perceives something strange and terrifying in Grenouille, especially since it does not emit any odor of its own. Father Terrier is frightened by Grenouille's early fascination with smell as a child, and quickly becomes uncomfortable with the child's mysterious ability to smell through him. Although smell is a primary sense in humans, the overall dependency is based on a person's physical characteristics. If the young Grenouille could de...... middle of paper ......identified him as evil and emotionless he could no longer accept the fact that someone as simple and apparently normal as Grenouille could have committed these crimes violent. In the field of execution, however, Grenouille proves to be an alien capable of doing more than humans. Its intoxicating scent, made from the perfume of teenage girls, is enough to overwhelm the minds of those present. His alienation from birth onwards, to self-imposed alienation from the world, led him to become Grenouille the Great, deceiving the public into believing he was similar to other human beings, in order to ultimately captivate the people of Grasse with his sublime blend of perfumes. Grenouille, however, discovers that capturing human feeling and love through his perfume is not what he wants, and decides that he has no other purpose for living in the world and ends his life..