This passage expresses a main idea of this novel: a person's odor (or, in Grenouille's case, his utter lack of it) affects others' opinions more than any other sensory perception. It is necessary to b

This passage expresses a main idea of this novel: a person's odor (or, in Grenouille's case, his utter lack of it) affects others' opinions more than any other sensory perception. It is necessary to believe this idea if the reader is to believe that it was the scent of the adolescent girls who Grenouille killed, and not their appearances, voices, attitudes, personalities, or social contexts, that made them lovable or desirable. Grenouille distills, literally, the essence of very young womanhood in his final scent--at the cost of twenty-five young lives. It is this scent that enables him to escape from execution, even though he has duly been convicted of the crimes. If the reader accepts this point of view, it means that, to a significant extent, we live in a chemical world that we only dimly perceive or understand. That is, the overriding reason that we might like or dislike another human being is odor--not shared interests, visual cues, or more intangible notions such as goodness or virtue. This is one of the main reasons Perfume veers away from realism into the realm of fantasy.