Hyperbole

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Hyperbole in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

Kurt Vonnegut frequently uses hyperbole in his novels, for both dramatic and comedic effect. In this example from Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim emerges from an underground slaughterhouse where he has been held prisoner by the Germans during the deadly World War II firebombing of Dresden:

There was a fire-storm out there. Dresden was one big flame. The one flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn.

It wasn't safe to come out of the shelter until noon the next day. When the Americans and their guards did come out, the sky was black with smoke. The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.

Vonnegut's hyperbolic language, particularly his description of Dresden as "one big flame," helps him convey the enormous devastation left by the bombs. So too does his statement that, "the sky was black with smoke." While smoke from the bombs probably darkened the sky, it's improbable that the sky was completely black with smoke—Vonnegut exaggerates to emphasize the extent of the damage, to capture what the damage felt like.

Hyperbole in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle

In Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut uses hyperbole to describe his character Felix Hoenikker, a fictional scientist who helped invent the atomic bomb. As in Slaughterhouse Five, hyperbole allows Vonnegut to write about violence on an enormous scale, and to describe the twisted genius who invented the bomb with vividness and emotion. In the following example, the novel's narrator talks with Dr. Hoenniker's former research supervisor in search of clues to Hoenniker's personality:

"I understand you were Dr. Hoenikker's supervisor during most of his professional life," I said to Dr. Breed on the telephone.

"On paper," he said.

"I don't understand," I said.

"If I actually supervised Felix," he said, "then I'm ready now to take charge of volcanoes, the tides, and the migrations of birds and lemmings. The man was a force of nature no mortal could possibly control."

Of course, Dr. Breed isn't actually willing to take charge of volcanoes, tides, and other natural phenomena. He's comparing Felix Hoenikker to these forces of nature to show that Hoenniker is one of them: brilliant, self-contained and impossible to control.

Hyperbole in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Elizabeth Bennet, the most free-spirited character in Pride and Prejudice, refuses Mr. Darcy's marriage proposal with a string of hyperbole:

From the very beginning, from the first moment I may almost say, of my acquaintance with you, your manners impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form that ground-work of disapprobation, on which succeeding events have built so immoveable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.