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Part 2, Chapter 24
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Perfume, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Growing Up and Becoming Human
Power and Control
Creative Genius vs. Convention and Assimilation
Upward Mobility and Social Movement
Scent, Sight, and the Grotesque
Summary
Analysis
Grenouille spends the next few days settling in, as he has decided to stay on the mountain. He finds water in a crevasse and salamanders and ring snakes to eat, supplemented with lichen and mossberries. This is perfectly acceptable to him, as he requires no comforts but smells.
Descriptions like this keep the reader from empathizing with Grenouille, as he is again presented as something foreign and un-human.
Themes
Near the crevasse, Grenouille discovers a tunnel in the mountain that twists back 100 feet. At the end, there's a space large enough to sit and lie down. It's also quiet, dark, and doesn't smell of anything living. When Grenouille spreads his blanket, he is overcome by a sense of sacred awe, and feels entirely secure. He cries for joy.
Grenouille finds immense joy in discovering a place devoid of all the things he's spent the last few months avoiding: people, light, and sound. His joy at having found this place entirely alienates him from others, though.
Themes
The narrator discusses the people who seek solitude (saints, failures, prophets), who retreat to deserts or caves to be nearer to God. Grenouille, on the other hand, had no conception of God; rather, he sought solitude for his own pleasure and enjoyed life and himself immensely.
The comparison of Grenouille to people who seek comfort in religion will begin to develop more in the coming chapters, as Grenouille too finds meaning in an “inner world” apart from the rest of humanity.
Themes
