SOURCE: Borchardt, Edith. “Caricature, Parody, Satire: Narrative Masks as Subversion of the Picaro in Patrick Süskind's Perfume.” In State of the Fantastic: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Fantastic Literature and Film, edited by Nicholas Ruddick, pp. 97-103. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Borchardt examines the function and subversion of picaresque novel conventions in Perfume, equating the authorial narrator of the picaresque novel with Perfume's hyperbolic protagonist.

Patrick Süskind's novel Perfume (1985) is a picaresque narrative¹ that foregrounds the fantastic fictional biography of a pathological individual gifted with an extraordinary sense of smell against the background of a historically verifiable locale and context: eighteenth-century Paris and the beginnings of olfactory science in pre-Revolutionary France.² With his cleverly crafted story and eloquent account of his picaro's non-verbal experience of the world as a perfumer, Süskind expertly employs but simultaneously subverts the traditional...