Rhetorical question

A question asked without expecting an answer, either because the answer is already implied or because what matters is the doubt it exposes.

In One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand

What fault is it of ours, yours and mine, if words in themselves are empty? Empty, my dear. And you fill them with your meaning when you say them to me; and I, on receiving them, inevitably fill them with mine. We think we understand each other, and we do not understand each other at all.

"What fault is it of ours, yours and mine?" does not expect an answer, because the answer is already implied: none. The question takes the accusation out of the conversation and prepares the explanation that comes right after.

Book II: The reader and the house, Vitangelo Moscarda to the reader, after an hour of conversation in which both thought they had understood each other

To whom should I say “I”? What good was it to say “I,” if for others it had a meaning and a value that could never be mine; and for me, so far outside the others, taking on one (meaning) at once became the horror of this emptiness and this solitude?

Book VI: Saying "I" to whom, Vitangelo Moscarda, alone in the emptied room after Dida's departure