"Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut, contributed by Alex Klein Wassink (2025)
I want to discuss the attitude towards death and loss in this novel. This quotation is from the very beginning. It discusses Billy revisiting Dresden after the war:
I went back there with an old war buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare, and we made friends with a taxi driver, who took us to the slaughterhouse where we had been locked up at night as prisoner of war. His name was Gerhard Müller. He told us that he was a prisoner of the Americans for a while. We asked him how it was to live under Communism, and he said that it was terrible at first, because everybody had to work so hard, and because there wasn't much shelter or food or clothing. But things were much better now. He had a pleasant little apartment, and his daughter was getting an excellent education. His mother was incinerated in the Dresden fire-storm. So it goes. (5)
Particularly interesting is how the paragraph ends: “So it goes.” In fact, almost every time someone dies throughout the course of the book, Vonnegut ends the thought with “so it goes.” What does this say about a soldier/veteran’s attitude towards death in wartime, and even after wartime? In class we discussed death in wartime and we acknowledged it as a terrible tragedy. It felt as though an entire generation of men was lost. However, the perspective of a soldier who experienced death so personally has a different thought: it becomes so ubiquitous that he’s almost numb to it. That really is the case for Billy. He becomes intimately familiar with loss as his father dies just before the war and his wife dies afterwards. He also survives a plane crash in which everyone else dies. All he can say about death is “so it goes.”The novel then takes an odd turn. Billy becomes convinced he was abducted by aliens and kept in an alien zoo on another planet. This causes him to become unstuck in time, and to experience time as the tralfamadorians do, which is not linearly, but rather they experience all time at once.
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. 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’. (16)
It seems as though Billy is hallucinating about his experiences with the Tralfamadorians as a way to escape from his world which has been destroyed by war and ridden with death. This further adjusts how we understand Billy’s experience of loss, even further desensitizing him. The reality of this experience is probably something akin to PTSD combined with his familiarity with death. I think that his outlook is akin to magical thinking—he creates a world where everyone hasn’t died, at least not in the same sense. He sees each person as always alive in some moment of time. If death isn’t something to be feared and instead is just one moment among many, then all of the death that Billy has felt carries much less weight, and any fear of his own eventual demise subsides.We continue with Billy’s account of his own death as he predicted it, experienced it time and time again (as he is unstuck in time), and then retold it on a radio talk-show.