So it goes.

One of the things I noticed about Slaughterhouse Five when I first read this book (and I am among the ones that have read it before for World Since 1945) was Vonnegut's shameless overuse of the phrase "so it goes". At first it would really bother me. It would be one of those small technical things like Reed's use of numerals instead of spelling out the number like you're "supposed to" that would just get on my nerves. Vonnegut mentioned that the Tralfamadorians would say "so it goes" whenever someone would die, and that's about as far as he would go to address the subject. He always uses it after he has just described some tragic event, and I suppose what else can you say. He uses "so it goes" to quickly divert from the tragic event he has just talked about and move on. I suppose that follows the Tralfamadorian view of time, how people never actually die because they are still living somewhere in time, since it wouldn't make sense to get sad over death. Vonnegut definitely doesn't seem to want to dwell on any traumatic event, which he alludes to when he talks about the story of Lot and his wife and says that "people aren't supposed to look back." Rather than dramatizing every horrific thing he tells us like many books do, he sort of brushes it off with a kind of "whatever" attitude that provides an emotional detachment. I think I like it better that way. I think it makes the events that he's talking have more of an impact since he makes them seem commonplace and with an air of "I see that all the time". It also makes the reader conscience of every time he uses "so it goes", so you really notice and remember when he's talking about something tragic that he's witnessed. If the only thing you remember from the book is how often he uses so it goes I guess you wouldn't be in that bad of shape. You would remember that meant that there were a lot of tragic things that happened during the bombing of Dresden. And I suppose that's something.