His purpose is always to show human worthlessness extravagantly blessed with gifts from God (as a fretful, demanding baby is blessed with instinctive care and nurturance, and as a selfish, distractible child is given the full benefit of a traditional education), and appalling human sinfulness showered with God’s grace, which if accepted leads to blissful eternal life. It’s necessary, in this schema, for the author to denigrate his own expressive genius even as he parades it, and he makes this reversal many times with considerable wit and charm.
