Hyperbole is a prime technique through which Hemingway conveys his wit and sarcastic temperament. One example occurs when Bill and Jake struggle to get a meal on the train to Spain on account of a large group of Catholic pilgrims:
Finally at a quarter past four we had lunch. Bill had been rather difficult at the last. He buttonholed a priest who was coming back with one of the returning streams of pilgrims. “When do us Protestants get a chance to eat, father?”
“I don’t know anything about it. Haven’t you got tickets?”
“It’s enough to make a man join the Klan,” Bill said. The priest looked back at him.
The hyperbolic suggestion that this group of pilgrims would irritate Bill enough to make him join the Ku Klux Klan—which is notorious for its persecution of Catholics in addition to its propagation of racial violence—is both evidence of Bill's (and Hemingway's) biting sarcasm and also the moral relativism of the age, in which all manner of snide remarks and cruel comments are made by the characters as they struggle with the search for meaning. On a broader level, this hyperbolic statement simply conveys a sense of impatience and scorn, thus slightly emphasizing the cynical outlook that the novel sets forth.
