Essay - "So It Goes" Slaughterhouse 5

1.
What is the significance of the narrator’s repeated comment “So

it goes,” and what attitude do you think it is meant to express?
Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade is a science fiction-infused anti-

war novel by Kurt Vonnegut. The text centers on Billy's capture by the German Army
and his survival of the Allied firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war.
The narrator of this story is Billy Pilgrim. And that narration is not linear. The writer
consciously and skillfully travels through time and space. He travels throughout Billy's
life from youth to old age. And to make the story more interesting, the writer also
inserted science fiction motifs, such as creatures from Tralfamadore. And Billy's
adventures on their planet, which changes Billy's whole life.
“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies
he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for
people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have
existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments
just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can
see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that
interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows
another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad
condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of
other moments.“
Tralfamadorians were so advanced and they had very modern technologies. They
were beings who communicated telepathically. That they were advanced is also
demonstrated by their space saucer, which could travel between great distances and
pass from planet to planet very quickly. Since they were very advanced, they also had
developed their own philosophy of life and life after death (as with people on earth).
They argued that people do not really die. They said that it was just an illusion, and
that they all still live in a special dimension. While a person is dead in one particular
moment, they are still alive and well in all of the other moments of their life. Billy was
fascinated by their philosophy. And as proof of that, every time he encounters a dead
person, he “simply shrug(s)” and says “so it goes.” And since this is a book about war,
there were a handful of murders, deaths and accidents. And there is a qoute from the
book which shows the way Tralfamadorians think:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . .
“That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the
awful times and concentrate on the good ones.”
This quote sends a strong and optimistic message to all people to stay strong
despite all the problems and to always look on the brighter side.
Billy was lucky because he traveled through time. He traveled constantly,
whenever he had the opportunity. That saved him from staying alive and more or less
good with his mind. There were too many cases where Billy was about to die. He was
unconscious several times. He was often under the influence of morphine, which
helped him wander even further into the world of illusion. And when so many deaths
happen in front of your eyes, it usually leaves a deep mark on a person.
Billy’s father dies in a hunting accident just as Billy is about to go off to war. So it
goes. A former hobo dies in Billy’s railway car while declaring the conditions not bad
at all. So it goes. One hundred thirty thousand innocent people die in Dresden. So it
goes. Valencia Pilgrim accidentally kills herself with carbon monoxide after turning
bright blue. So it goes. Billy Pilgrim is killed by an assassin’s bullet at exactly the time
he has predicted, in the realization of a thirty-some-year-old death threat. So it goes.
Here is one more quote from the novel about different meaning of word death:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“How’s the patient?” asked Derby.
“Dead to the world.”
“But not actually dead.”
“No.”
“How nice - to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”
The other thing the writer is trying to convey to us is that war makes people not
react too stressfully to deaths. This is somewhat normal. Because a man gets used to
everything in life. He gets used to the better easier, and a little harder to the bad. But
the fact is that in the end he gets used to everything. So it goes" follows every mention
of death in the novel, equalizing all of them, whether they are natural, accidental, or
intentional, and whether they occur on a massive scale or on a very personal one. Also,
the repetition of the phrase keeps a tally of the cumulative force of death throughout
the novel, thus pointing out the tragic inevitability of death.
Humans are powerless compared to natural forces. It is clear to everyone and it is the
essence of our life. Because of this, people often find themselves in situations where
nothing depends on them. So, when you cannot do anything, so it goes.

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1.

What is the significance of the narrator’s repeated comment “So

Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade is a science fiction-infused anti-

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