"Slaughterhouse 5," by Kurt Vonnegut is literary masterpiece that reflects the horrors of war and death using science fiction and satirical approach. This anti-war novel centers on Billy Pilgrim, a meek, feeble optometry student who gets drafted into World War II and becomes "un-stuck in time"; he travels forwards and backwards to different places and points in his life. Some of the moments that he revisits are painful, and implicate death. Frequently, the phrase "so it goes" is used as a device to discuss the human perception of death. This phrase evokes deep thought for the reader. .
Kurt Vonnegut has his protagonist experience the horrors of war. In each incident, where the character experiences someone else die, or hears a story involving death, the phrase "so it goes" punctuates the passage. "So it goes" is relative to time, war, and death. It is one of the metaphorical phrases Vonnegut used throughout the book to help convey the overall messages.
The recurring theme "so it goes" is strategically placed 106 times in Slaughterhouse 5. In context, the narrator will reference death of a person(s) and immediately after, "so it goes" followed. The first use of this phrase was right in the beginning; the narrator was referring to a cab driver that Billy Pilgrim and his old friend from war were acquaintances with, "His mother was incinerated in the Dresden fire-storm. So it goes" (Vonnegut 2). This is a literary device installed by the author. The author, Kurt Vonnegut, was involved in World War II himself and participated in horrible experiences such as the Battle of the Bulge and Dresden. The Battle of the Bulge occurred in 1944 to early 1945, and was the final primary Nazi attack on the Allies in World War II. It was the largest battle fought by the Americans in WWII (HistoryLearningSite.co.uk). Out of the Americans, 75,000 lives were lost, and about 100,000 German lives were lost.