Definition of Hyperbole
Key Examples in The Beautiful and Damned
In the first few chapters of The Beautiful and Damned, the narrator uses hyperbole to express Anthony's heightened self-consciousness and narcissism. The section of Chapter 1 titled "Past and Person of the Hero" describes Anthony's greatest fear in exaggerated terms:
At eleven he had a horror of death. Within six impressionable years his parents had died and his grandmother had faded off almost imperceptibly, until, for the first time since her marriage, her person held for one day an unquestioned supremacy over her own drawing room. So to Anthony life was a struggle against death, that waited at every corner. It was as a concession to his hypochondriacal imagination that he formed the habit of reading in bed—it soothed him.