He learns from other people’s reactions, rejections that his lack of smell is a problem, a fear, a condemnation.
While this is never explicitly said in the book unlike the identity part, it is clear to me. More than a lack of identity which gives a human being a place in and a sense of belonging to a community, what Grenouille really lacks is a sense of love. Indeed, he equates the lost or absent individual scent to an absence or loss of identity which, coupled with being an orphan can only send that theory in deeper places, that creep in him the justifications that he later give him the absolute “sense” of freedom that blinds him to the rights of others and the responsibility he has to his community. In a twisted conclusion, the orphan makes it his individual quest to find that lost individual scent. While he is deprived of an individual smell, he is gifted with a formidable nose, two facts at opposite and intertwined sides of his identity coin. The orphan seems to be doomed from the start. The main character and villain is Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. So, if those previous sentences were not enough to warn you, let me spell it out: Beware spoilers, beware horror. The power of a nose, the forgotten sense in essence, pardon the pun, is overwhelming.
Süskind is gifted with an impeccable style full of elegant writing and sensory historical details that send the reader into a trance where sense and scents flirt with envy, fear, madness, horror and eventually death, even murder. About Das Parfum (Perfume) by Patrick Süskindĭas Parfum (Perfume) is a fiction novel originally written in German and later translated, among other languages, to English.
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