In her essay "I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read," what is Francine Prose's purpose in piling one rhetorical question on top of the...

As she moves toward the end of her essay “I Know Why the
Caged Bird Cannot Read,” Francine Prose asks a number of rhetorical questions.  Here are
several examples of such questions:

readability="16">

Why not introduce our kids to the clarity and
power of James Baldwin’s great story “Sonny’s
Blues”?

++++++++++++++++++++++

Why
not celebrate the accuracy and vigor with which he [that is, Mark Twain] translated the
rhythms of American speech into written
language?

++++++++++++++++++++++

Doesn’t
our epidemic dumbing-down have undeniable advantages for those institutions (the media,
the advertising industry, the government) whose interests are better served by a
population not trained to read too closely or ask too many
questions?

Prose’s own
questions serve a number of rhetorical functions, including the
following:

• they engage the reader’s own
  mind


• they encourage the reader to
  think


• they imply that Prose values the reader’s
  opinions


• they show that despite her earlier criticism of
  Maya Angelou, Prose admires the works of “better” African-American writers such as James
  Baldwin.


• they show that Prose, for all her harsh
  criticism of various trends, is capable of celebrating fine writing and fine
  writers


• they therefore show that Prose has a positive
  agenda, not merely a negative one, and that she is not a uniformly acerbic
  critic


• the final question, in particular, is likely to
  appeal both to political conservatives (distrustful of big government and the media) and
  political liberals (distrustful of the advertising industry and also of aspects of
  government and media)


• the final question, in particular,
  implies that Prose is simply a person who wants other persons to have opportunities to
  think for themselves and thus have better control over their own lives (two noble
  goals).