A Christmas Carol is full of hyperbole. From its dramatic characterization to its highly embellished descriptions of the setting, this text exemplifies exaggeration. For instance, when Scrooge's nephew complains that he is too cross, Scrooge replies:
“What else can I be [...] when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! [...] What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,” said Scrooge, indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas,’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!"
Scrooge does not literally live in a "world of fools," nor does he plan to boil people in their own pudding or impale them with stakes of holly. But these exaggerated statements communicate the depth of his disdain for Christmas. Dickens uses hyperbole to great effect, especially in the first stave, in order to give readers a complete picture of Scrooge's initial mindset. In this scene, violent hyperbole makes it difficult to believe that Scrooge has any hope of reforming the way he thinks about humanity. But that disbelief just makes his transformation all the more remarkable.
