So It Goes

Chapter Three has been a very, very strange chapter. It jumped form time to time, to different issues, characters, situations and stories. As I understood Billy Pilgrim is the protagonist of Slaughterhouse Five, if I’m wrong he is just part of the story. The perfect description of the chapter is stated at the beginning of it “He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1942. he has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963.” (pg 23)That’s exactly what happens in the chapter. Vonnegut connects one decade with the other without previous announcement, so a close attention is needed not to get lost while writing.

What definitely caught my attention about this chapter is the story of Tralfamadore. “He said that he had been kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians on the night of his daughter’s wedding. He hadn’t been missed, he said, because Tralfamadorians had taken him through a time warp, so that he could be on Tralfamadore for years, and still be away from Earth for only a microsecond.” (pg. 26) I read this quote about three times. I remembered Narnia, the Lion the Witch and The Wardrobe, how the four siblings could be in Narnia for years and come back to Earth like if no time had passed. What caught my attention was how off the topic this Tralfamadore “trip” from the Dresden war destruction account. It does make it a little less personal and less credible; it even makes it as it were science fiction.

“So it goes” The phrase had caught my eye since chapter one, I had underlined all the times that it was written because it was odd that many paragraphs ended with “so it goes.” I finally understood that it had to do with the mystery of Tralfamadore “Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is ‘So it goes.’” (pg 27) The quote relates the science fiction of Tralfamadore with the life story of Billy in war, which is the main basis of the book: war. “So it goes” give me the sense of giving up, for me is similar to “whatever”, there is nothing you can do about it. He died, so what? So it goes.