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.
This passage includes many hyperbolic phrases like "a horror of death," "unquestioned supremacy," and "struggle against death." Dramatic diction reflects the depth of his fear. Anthony has no particular reason to fear death: he is perfectly healthy, well-connected, and supported by vast financial resources. Nonetheless, he sees life as a struggle. He takes his comfortable upbringing for granted and becomes fixated on this fear of death, which, to his younger self, seems to lurk "at every corner."
One might interpret this passage as an innocent exaggeration or a childish misplacement of concern. However, imagination gets the best of Anthony well into his adulthood. In his youth, rather than mourning his relatives, Anthony worries about the preservation of his own life. And well into adulthood, when his grandfather dies, he is not concerned with death or mourning but with inheriting the family fortune. Anthony expects others to pay for his life, and yet he lives only for himself. His tendency to dramatize his own life translates into a habit of aggrandizing his irrational impulses. And in order to express the ridiculous nature of Anthony's worldview, the narrator uses hyperbolic language that underscores his narcissism.
