31 pages • 1 hour read
Tom RobbinsA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Alobar is Jitterbug Perfume’s main character and the author’s chief mouthpiece. Alobar’s ideas sometimes come from himself, sometimes from the narrator, and the separation between the two breaks down throughout the story. Alobar is also the character who undergoes the greatest change throughout the novel, going from king to pauper to businessman to prisoner. Of the ensemble of central characters, his ending is the most ambiguous. He disappears from the text with a dire warning about the modern world being a sham stripped of choice.
If certain characters stand in for the author, Priscilla Pertido stands in for the reader. In some ways, she’s a construction made to produce Tom Robbins’s ideal of a reader. She’s smart, witty, and urbane. Her origins are humble, but she strives for greatness. She seeks answers to life’s biggest questions, some of which are metaphysical. She has a strong appetite for sex and sensual experience, and a deeply ingrained sense of humor.
Toward the end, Alobar recedes both as a narrative character and as a strong mouthpiece for the author. This is where Wiggs Dannyboy comes in. He is spoken of as a drug addict and a con artist. Everything about him, including his name, is heightened and slightly unbelievable. Yet he commands enough respect from every character in the book to dictate the circumstances of their story. In early Renaissance drama, playwrights had a name for a plot contrivance that swoops in and rescues everyone from their conflicts: deus ex machina, which translates as “god from a machine.” Wiggs Dannyboy plays this role in Jitterbug Perfume . He directs all the other characters, setting their lives into the patterns they will take after the novel concludes. His audaciousness represents the audaciousness of the author, who would go so far as to write a novel purporting to be a comprehensive explanation of the meaning of life.
Kudra is an important catalyst for action in Jitterbug Perfume. She’s Alobar’s partner in immortality, though she’s usually being one step ahead of him in understanding life’s most important questions. Like Priscilla, she is sexually and intellectually voracious. Unlike Priscilla, Kudra’s will and sense of direction is powerful enough to send her body into an ethereal state from which she experiences “the other side.” Her return from this state signals the end of the book and the start of new beginnings.
Claude and Marcel LeFever stand at the pinnacle of material success in Robbins’s world. They deal in sensual experience, and they profit mightily from it. They are presented as two imperfect halves of a whole. Claude has a head for law and business; Marcel has an unparalleled ability to discern scent. The LeFever corporation requires both figures to succeed.
Still, it is Marcel whose lecture on fragrance clues Wiggs Dannyboy toward new dimensions in immortality studies, and at whose word everyone suddenly becomes wealthy. Robbins clearly favors Marcel’s creative approach over Claude’s head for business.
Lily Devalier exists in a material state between Priscilla and the LeFevers. A small business owner, she’s in charge of her own destiny and a master of her craft. She is at one with her setting, the sensual and strange New Orleans. She is also the key to Priscilla’s past, having raised Priscilla as her adopted daughter. However, it is V’lu, Lily’s employee and confidant, who stands ready to inherit the business.
Pan is the well-known god of Greek mythology whose song, “because it served no purpose, because, indeed, it transcended the human yoke of purposes, was, above all, liberating” (144). By Part 4, Pan barely exists anymore, having turned invisible due to the changed values of modern society. His presence in Seattle and New Orleans is determined entirely by his smell, and he seems to inspire less lust and idleness in his new incarnation, and more violence and mayhem. It is Pan’s presence, for instance, that starts the riot in Seattle that takes the life of one of Wiggs Dannyboy’s associates.
By Tom Robbins