So it goes?

“So it goes” is perhaps the most iconic line in all of Slaughterhouse-Five. It is repeated dozens of times, sometimes more than once in a single paragraph, to the point where we as readers almost become desensitized to its presence. We are introduced to “So it goes” in Chapter 2, when Billy first describes Tralfamadore while he is writing his second letter to the media. He says that this is the Tralfamadorian reaction to hearing about death. This makes sense – for a people for whom time isn’t linear, it’s just like seeing a cave or a tree on the side of a mountain, just a part of the landscape. Death is not an ending point as we see it on Earth, and so fixating on it is pointless. Unfortunately, for Billy, his perception of time isn’t perfectly Tralfamadorian, in that he can’t see the whole mountain at once, he still has to only see select paths, but the order that he climbs them is a little more fluid than for most Earthlings, and so for Billy, death is still a consequential and motivating force of living. Regardless, Billy’s opinion of death ends up being that of “I can’t change anything so I won’t try”, and every time he says “So it goes” is just a reaffirmation of that fact.

            In class we talked about how this mentality can be comforting. For one, it takes away the feeling of the randomness of life. If everything is predetermined and can never change, then there is comfort in knowing how things end up turning out for you. Knowing your death and becoming familiar with the concept of dying normalizes it for you, and makes it less scary. Other than death, a common piece of wisdom I’ve heard is “This too shall pass”, which I think is in the same vein as “So it goes”. There is comfort in knowing the world will continue to move, despite tragedy, and however numbingly horrible something may make you feel in the moment, it will be better in the future.

            But I don’t think the “So it goes” of the novel was intended to be comforting. It’s true that for Billy perhaps it was, but I think Vonnegut was trying to achieve a very different effect with the phrase. I believe that “So it goes” was meant as a direct challenge to wars and atrocities, and to a pro-war mentality. Typically, reading about atrocities, we become desensitized to the vast amount of suffering they contain. For example, if I say that the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar currently has a death toll of over 10,000 people, you probably recognize that that is a big number and a tragedy, but that is about the extent of your reaction. You may do a little extra reading, finding that over 1,000 children under the age of five have been killed, and again, this will strike you as horrible, and perhaps make you angry at the world, but on that large of a scale, you probably can’t even really say how much 1,000 people is. I fully acknowledge that I too sometimes skim over statistics. I am not trying to guilt anyone, or try to make myself seem any more woke, as if I do think past the statistic every time I read the news, because the fact is I don’t. I can’t. I have never witnessed death in person, much less violent death, much less violent death on such a massive scale. It’s hard to relate to a number, it’s hard to imagine the total and complete devastation. I think it is this element of our culture that Vonnegut is trying to provoke. We are used to reading a statistic, contemplating it – maybe analyzing its causes, or providing an opinion, and then flipping the page to the next fact. Very few of us become activists for the horrible things we read about on the news.

That desensitization is used towards things like the fire-bombing of Dresden. By presenting us with a narrative we actively sympathize with – it’s hard not to feel bad for poor, bullied Billy Pilgrim, all alone in the train car or getting kicked by Weary – and then undermining it with the “So it goes” statement, Vonnegut gives us a shock of emotion. When the logic we use so often when looking at tragedies – “So it goes” – is thrown back at us, after we have bonded to the character, we feel angry. We feel like, no, it shouldn’t go like this. We want to take Vonnegut, or the Tralfamadorians, or even Billy, and shake them, and tell them “No, stop, don’t just dismiss this. This sucks!”. I think what Vonnegut is trying to do with this novel is gently take our hands off his shoulders and point to Dresden and say “So why didn’t you care before you heard this story?”. He is critiquing the fact that we are passive until it gets personal.

            So is this an effective critique? I think overall, yes. There were definitely moments when Billy would describe an event when I would think something along the lines of “What?? You’re just going to dismiss it like that?”. For example, in the last moments of the novel, Derby’s death is simply described as “He was tried and shot. So it goes.” (Vonnegut 214). Derby is one of the most sympathetic characters in the entire novel, and it’s hard to let him go without the fanfare a war novel would have given him. But there are some moments that trouble me – for example, the use of “So it goes” for all instances of death, on all scales. The most extreme examples would be Billy describing the fire-bombing of Dresden with a “So it goes”, but also water that has gone flat. It seems like those two ideas are not at all comparable, and yet Vonnegut gives them the same treatment. In addition, I don’t understand what exactly Vonnegut wants us to do. He seems to be critiquing our passivity towards conflicts that don’t affect us, but offers no apparent solution, just critique. It’s true that we can just be more aware of the fact that we are not realizing the human experience of tragedies, but beyond that, he doesn’t urge us to actually do anything to change society. I might be wrong on this though, so if you have any ideas as to what he might be trying to achieve, please leave them in the comments, I actually am interested.