Well, I just finished Slaughterhouse-Five, and I'm not quite sure what to think of it. It was an incredibly interesting read with tons of clever writing that I thoroughly enjoyed, but I'm not sure I quite understood what Vonnegut wanted to say. I feel like I missed a lot of the references he made as well as the meaning of all the textual echoes he included. I think it's the sort of book you would have to read twice or more in order to truly grasp (or at least I would). As it is, though, this is the meaning I ended up interpreting:
Life is full of death, violence, and all sorts of horrible occurrences, but we have to learn to accept these things and focus instead on all of the good things that come. It's the point the Tralfamadorians were repeating throughout the story, and I think the phrase "so it goes" is a reflection of this way of thinking. After meeting the Tralfamadorians, Billy says this phrase after every time someone or something dies in the book. It's the equivalent of saying, "Shit happens, and there's nothing I can do about it, so I may as well forget about it." His way of saying it is just a bit shorter.
This point is also brought up in the end when Vonnegut goes on to say that 10,000 people die of starvation every day, and 123,000 more people die of other causes. After another "so it goes," he states that despite all of this death, there is a net gain of 191,000 lives every day. For every bad thing in life, there is something happier to focus on.
Throughout the book, Billy is rarely pictured as getting upset over any of the horrible things he witnesses, and he is generally a happy person despite being a POW in one of the harshest if not the harshest wars in this world's entire history. Maybe it's just because he's ignorant or crazy, but I'm more inclined to think that his life was made better simply because he looked at the happy moments in his life rather than that sad moments.
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