The first time I read “so it goes” in Slaughterhouse-Five I was very confused because I was like, what goes?? I then noticed that’s Vonnegut’s way of basically moving on and not bringing any further attention to the thing that “left.” After I realized it was the catchphrase of the book, I noticed it more whenever it’d pop up and would read a few sentences back to clarify what died. It was really eye opening because some of the times it wasn’t even a person who was passing, but an object that was destroyed. I never thought of objects as having living attributes, because they don’t really, but Vonnegut still treated them like they had real life and emotion by using his infamous “so it goes” phrase. It gave attention to the fact that this object will never be the same as it was before, and the “so it goes” part shows the turning point of it being unchangeable back to its initial form.
One example of this happening is on page 129, when Vonnegut is describing Billy’s bedside while he is in the veterans hospital, and says, “two pills, an ashtray with three lipstick-stained cigarettes in it, one cigarette still burning, and a glass of water. The water was dead. So it goes.” This sentence in specific was shocking to me because I’d never heard or thought about describing water as “dead.” Sure, I understand that old water doesn’t taste great, so many people throw it out and get some new water. Using “so it goes” to describe the state of the water was a different perspective I’ve never seen. If there was anything from the things that were listed that I think would make sense to describe as “dead” it would be the cigarettes. This is because you can’t use them anymore and they lost their value, they are unreusable. However, I think the water itself is drinkable, it may not taste great, but it’s still functional and does it’s job, which is to hydrate.
When Billy talked about the “silliness or murder” shows airing on the TV on page 255, I imagined someone curled up on the couch with a bowl of popcorn and burrito-wrapped in a blanket. But once I read the “so it goes” sentence directly afterwards, it hit me that the shows are talking about death. This just shows how much the three-worded sentence snaps me into reality and gives me a different perspective to look at. Another place Vonnegut does this is on page 143 when Billy’s describing the Earth exhibit in the Tralfamadorian zoo. Billy says, “There was a stereophonic phonograph. The phonograph worked. The television didn’t. There was a picture of one cowboy killing another one pasted to the television tube. So it goes.” I initially just imagined a picture, similar to how people have family photos placed on their mantels nowadays. The “so it goes” in this sentence shifted my view, instead of focusing on the layout of the exhibit and how/where things were placed, I now focused on the cowboys, and the fact that there was such a disturbing photo on display.
