The Law of Life

A rhetorical question is one that isn’t asked with the expectation of a response. This may be because the speaker intends to provide an answer, or—as in “The Law of Life”—because the answer is implied or otherwise obvious. Here, for instance, are two rhetorical questions Koskoosh poses while musing about his granddaughter’s failure to provide him with more firewood: “[S]he was ever a careless child, and honored not her ancestors from the time the Beaver, son of the son of Zing-ha, first cast eyes upon her. Well, what mattered it? Had he not done likewise in his own quick youth?” (Paragraph 20). The effect is not simply to suggest that Koskoosh was similarly “careless” as a young man, but rather to suggest that such carelessness is all but inevitable; according to Koskoosh, the young are simply not disposed to pay attention to the elderly, or mortality more generally. Other rhetorical questions in the story serve a similar purpose, underscoring the immutability of the life cycle and Koskoosh’s resignation to his own impending death by framing these things as questions with preordained answers.