Background of The Study

CHAPTER 1 1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of The Study

The tragedy such a murdering frequently happens within society. Almost every day on television, radio station, and newspaper report about murdering. Those incidents are caused by many factors, for example jeolousy, grudge, debt, and so on. These things are very different conditions within novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind. In the novel, Patrick Suskind gave explanations about tragic murdering to produce perfume. The writer was interested to analyze a novel of Patrick Suskind entitled “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.” This novel tells about perfume was made of 25 virgin girls’ aroma. Jean- Baptiste Grenouille, who had a good sense of smell, was a genius and capable to make good fragrant. He was obsessed to make the best perfume because he had ever smelled a virgin girl’s aroma. Then he murdered 25 virgin girls to take their body fragrance. The virgin girls died improperly. Their clothes, hair and head skins were lost. The murdering of the 25 girls was successfully done with planned and mysterious ways and finally created the best virgin perfume with magic. As the object of this paper, the writer will analyze the tragic virgin perfume on “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” by Patrick Suskind. Novel is a long work of prose fiction. In English the word “novel” was borrowed from French and Italian to describe these works and to distinguish them Universitas Sumatera Utara from medieval and classical romances as something that was new. In their book, they also says that there are four aspects of fiction, works of fiction share a number of common elements, they are: character, plot, structure, and theme. First, Character is an extended verbal representation of human being, the inner self that determines thought, speech, and behavior. A story is usually concerned with a major problem that a character must face. This may involve interaction with another character, with a difficult situation, or with an idea or general circumstances that force action. The character may win, lose, or tie. He or she may learn and be better for the experience or may miss the point and be unchanged. Second, Plot is the serial arrangement of incidents, ideas or events. The story of the novel progresses through various plots and conflicts. One of the most important elements in shaping a work of fiction is plot. In the analysis of the story, sometimes the plot is called as groove. Third, Structure refers to the way a plot is assembled. Chronologically, all stories are similar because they all move from beginning to end in accord with the time it takes for causes to produce effects. Fourth, Theme is something which becomes the authors thought. It means explains about view of life or the author’s image and how the consider the case. Theme becomes a basic development of the whole part of the story the novel. To understand a novel, we should know prose elements, such as plots, characters, settings, themes, point of view, and figure of speech. Furthermore, an ability in identifying novel elements is required to analyze a novel. The writer uses descriptive methods or library researches by collecting data from some books in library and searching information from internet. The writer also uses intrinsic Universitas Sumatera Utara approaches by Wellek and Warren 1994:24, which is taken from data in the text.

1.2 The Problem of The Study