When Benjamin is waiting to dance with Hildegarde for the first time—having fallen in love with her at first sight at a high society ball—the narrator captures his emotional experience using hyperbolic language and a simile:
He stood close to the wall, silent, inscrutable, watching with murderous eyes the young bloods of Baltimore as they eddied around Hildegarde Moncrief, passionate admiration in their faces. How obnoxious they seemed to Benjamin; how intolerably rosy! […] [W]hen his own time came, and he drifted with her out upon the changing floor to the music of the latest waltz from Paris, his jealousies and anxieties melted from him like a mantle of snow.
The hyperbolic language in this passage—such as the descriptions of Benjamin watching Hildegarde’s suitors with “murderous eyes” and judging them as “intolerably rosy”—captures his jealousy and inner turmoil. Eyes cannot literally be murderous nor can people being “rosy” (or cheerful) be genuinely “intolerable.” Benjamin just experiences the men this way because of his intense desire to be close to Hildegarde.
The simile here—“his jealousies and anxieties melted from him like a mantle of snow”—communicates the deep relief Benjamin feels when it’s finally his turn to dance with Hildegarde. While Hildegarde is able to offer Benjamin this kind of calming connection during their courtship and the early years of their marriage, ultimately she pulls away as Benjamin gets younger, proving that she could not offer him the long-term supportive relationship that he desires.
Near the end of the novel, the narrator describes Benjamin’s experience of attending kindergarten alongside his grandson, using a hyperbole in the process:
Five years later Roscoe’s little boy had grown old enough to play childish games with little Benjamin under the supervision of the same nurse. Roscoe took them both to kindergarten on the same day and Benjamin found that playing with little strips of colored paper, making mats and chains and curious and beautiful designs, was the most fascinating game in the world.
Here the narrator describes how, to Benjamin’s child mind, playing with colored paper “was the most fascinating game in the world.” This hyperbolic language captures the extreme changes that have taken place in Benjamin’s brain as he has aged in reverse—while playing with colorful paper made him “dowse off to sleep” when he was sent to kindergarten as a 65-year-old in a five-year-old’s body, now it is the “most fascinating game in the world.” This is because he has regressed to an early developmental stage and, like most children, he is fascinated by simple and mundane things, like construction paper.
This hyperbole shows how different developmental stages deeply change a person’s personality and identity—though Benjamin is still Benjamin, he is no longer a man with developed cognitive abilities. Though he has lived for 65 years, he has a five-year-old's brain and has thus returned to a child-like state.
