Analysis Of Kurt Vonnegut's Novel 'Slaughterhouse-Five'

Slaughterhouse-Five “So it Goes”: Someone breaks something? So it goes. Somebody dies? So it goes. Throughout Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “Slaughterhouse-five”, “so it goes” was stated 106 times expressing the general sense of acquiescence to the way things are. The author made that the catchphrase to show that bad things that occur should be accepted, because there is nothing that can be done to change it, bringing in the idea of fate. Vonnegut made very big examples of using “so it goes” with people that went through these types of events, the Tralfamadorians that the main character Billy Pilgrim encountered, and the story from the Gideon bible that was alluded to in the novel. Moreover, Kurt Vonnegut writes about his friends going through tragic or life changing events and of course ending with “so it goes”. The novel starts out with trivial reasons why some people got killed in Dresden, many of them concluding “so it goes”. A notable example Bernard O’Hare who grew up with Vonnegut during the war. He survived the bombing and “his mother was incinerated in the Dresden fire-storm. So it goes.”(2) Vonnegut said it the moment he wrote about the death of O’Hare’s mother. He says it because it may be a tragedy but there is nothing anyone can do about it thus so it goes. Another example relating to characters would

This is about a women whose town is on fire and she runs away. God told her to keep running and not look back “and Lot 's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”(26) She kept running and she knew if she looked back, she would die. It didn’t stop her from doing the most humane choice what