I think that the modern consciousness gets more and more to be an ungodly mix. He probably sees it as kind of straight, that he has a motive and he knows what he's doing. I guess it's a ragbag of Rambo movies and repressed homosexuality. We need all this vanity and egotism if you're going to write. It's a sad thing, but it's an inevitable thing.
Writers are really like everyone else in that department.
Although I think that everyone sees a bit of their own egotism in these extreme examples. Try stopping them. I don't think that they're any more self-obsessed than they used to be. One difference is that we're so much more clued up about what we're supposed to be thinking and feeling. We know what we're going through.