A Study Of Postmodern Parody Of Patrick Suskind’s Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer

Patrick Suskind (1949-) is one of Germany’s literary representative writers in the 1980’s. His masterpiece Perfume:the Story of a Murderer, published in 1985, has become one of the most influential novels in the world in 20th century. As a German writer ranking in the "post-modern way of writing", his works break the boundaries between popular literature and serious literature. On the one hand, Suskind inherited German literature written tradition that describing small potatoes. His novels gather the basic elements of character and plot into coherent novel, in order to expressing modern survival status and spiritual crisis that is depressed, depression, loss, anxiety, fear and so on. On the other hand, his novels absorb modernist fiction’s concepts and aesthetic skills. He put parody into writing, such as parodying criminal novels on the subject, parodying initiation story on the structure, and parodying religion figure on characters. The novel as a whole is less serious implication in the popular form of external domination. It brings a soft of self-reflection about the traditional way of writing subversive and postmodern writing style innovation. This paper attempts to take parody as a starting point to explore this novel’s post-modern characteristics.The first chapter starts with analyzing how this paper parodies detective fiction on scenes and themes. Perfume drawing on the theme of criminal novel based on the bold form of subversion. Also it translates the traditional track down offenders themes into odor of search, and smell is the themes of imagination and amplified by extending a single the story to socialization, religious dimension of smell outside. Through unconventional narrative, the writer expands a unique narrative perspective of the smell, rewrites the theme of crime and punishment, and dispels the criminal novels’narrative feature the pay attention to the narrative characteristics of the strict analysis, logic reasoning. The novel presents us with a bizarre world of smell.The second chapter discusses its initiation story parody through the analysis of the structure of the novel. Initiation story changed to build a positive, progressive structural model hero growing process in the past. It uses lack of self-offenders to find the body to self-destruction as basic infrastructure, and change the transition of the grand themes on the subject of growth history. This adverse or dark growth pattern implies a writer’s reflection for the survival of the modern mode.The third chapter mainly analyzes the parody of sacred images. The novel involves a lot of mythological archetype and religious imagery. The hero, for example, is given a lot of religious irony in the novel. By parodying heroic image of Prometheus, it shapes a protagonist with a combination of the genius and devil. Also, the writer discredits and ridicules the God. By parodying religious imagery such as God, Christ and the sinners, it reveals the modern religious belief and doubts about the bewildered expression of multiple levels of mental status of modern people.The fourth chapter mainly explains hidden meaning under the framework of a serious form, and explores the fragility of modern rationality and missing humanity. As a deformity product of modern civilization, perfume suggests the emergence of modern civilization diseases such as spiritual beliefs with the rapid development of technology. Aiming at these practical problems of modern society, the writer put forward his critique and reflection.Perfume drawing on traditional literature based on the type cleverly integrated into postmodern writing skills, and the significance of parody is that for traditional subversion and rebellion. In this way, the writer reveals the absurdity of the real world and the contradiction and incompleteness of human nature, and also arouses the readers’ further reflection about survival circumstances and human nature thinking.