When Angelou wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings at the end of the 1960s, one of the necessary and accepted features of literature, according to critic Pierre A. Walker, was thematic unity. One of Angelou's goals was to create a book that satisfied this criterion, in order to achieve her political purposes, which were to demonstrate how to resist racism in America. The structure of the text, which resembles a series of short stories, is not chronological but is arranged according to themes.[3] Walker, in his 1993 article about Caged Bird, "Racial Protest, Identity, Words, and Form", focuses on the book's structure, and describes how it supports her presentation of racism. Walker states that critics had neglected analyzing its structure, choosing to focus instead on its themes, which he feels neglects the political nature of the book. He states, "One serves Angelou and Caged Bird better by emphasizing how form and political content work together".[67] Angelou structures her book so that it presents a series of lessons about how to resist racism and oppression. Maya's growth in resisting racism unifies the book thematically, something that "stands in contrast to the otherwise episodic quality of the narrative".[3] The way in which Angelou constructs, arranges, and organizes her vignettes often undermine the chronology of her childhood by "juxtaposing the events of one chapter with the events of preceding and following ones so that they too comment on each other".[3] As Dolly McPherson points out, Angelou does not record every experience, but instead selects, through a series of episodic chapters, "valuable, life-determining truths about the world, about her community, and about herself".[68] Lupton points out that Caged Bird's form develops from the characters' interaction with each other, not through the development of dramatic actions.[36] According to scholar Sondra O'Neale, unlike Angelou's poetry and despite the nonchronological structure of the book, which O'Neale calls "skillfully controlled", Angelou's prose "follows classic technique in nonpoetic Western forms".[69]
"During the months she spent writing the book, [Angelou] practically withdrew from the world. She'd set the bar high. Her ambition was to write a book that would honor the Black experience and affirm the 'human spirit.' She more than achieved her goal. She wrote a coming-of-age story that has become a modern classic".
—Marcia Ann Gillespie[5]
The incident with the "powhitetrash" girls in Caged Bird takes place in chapter 5, when Maya was ten years old, well before Angelou's recounting of her rape in chapter 12, which occurred when Maya was 8. Walker explains that Angelou's purpose in placing the vignettes in this way is that it followed her thematic structure.[70] Angelou's editor, Robert Loomis, agrees, stating that Angelou could rewrite any of her books by changing the order of her facts to make a different impact on the reader.[13] Hagen sees Angelou's structure somewhat differently, focusing on Maya's journey "to establish a worthwhile self-concept",[71] and states that she structures the book into three parts: arrival, sojourn, and departure, which occur both geographically and psychologically. Hagen notes that she does not begin Caged Bird chronologically, with Maya and Bailey's arrival in Stamps. Rather, she begins it later much later, with an embarrassing experience during an Easter service at church, an incident that demonstrates Maya's diminished sense of self, insecurity, and lack of status.[13] George E. Kent divides Caged Bird into two "areas of black life": the religious-folk tradition, as represented through Maya's grandmother, and the blues-street tradition, as represented through her mother. Kent states that the first impact of the blues-street tradition on Maya and her brother is instability, when their mother ships the children to Stamps.[72] Kent goes on to say that Angelou balances the qualities of both traditions, adding that "a good deal of the book's universality derives from black life's traditions seeming to mirror, with extraordinary intensity, the root uncertainty in the universe".[73]
Sidonie Ann Smith states that Angelou starts the book with the Easter service incident because it "defines the strategy of the narrative".[74] Smith also states that Angelou follows the convention in Black American autobiography, especially slave narratives, which recreates the environment of enslavement and oppression at the beginning, before describing how the protagonist escapes from it.[75] Hagen explains that Angelou's purpose is to demonstrate Maya's journey from insecurity to her feelings of worth gained by becoming a mother at the end of the book.[76] Even though the book begins with the Easter service, Angelou begins her "autobiographical journey" in Caged Bird with Maya and Bailey's train ride from California to Arkansas and continues in a triangular movement between Stamps, St. Louis, and California; according to Lupton, the reader, by following Maya's journeys, "can get a solid sense of how structure operates within an autobiographical text".[77] McPherson states that Angelou opens Caged Bird with the Easter poem, which she evaluates in light of the book's plot and themes, because it emphasizes its significance in her life, describes her rootlessness, and "is also a blues metaphor that foreshadows a cyclical pattern of renewal, rebirth, change in consciousness, and the circuitous journey of recovered innocence".[78]
