Slaughterhouse-Five
Slaughterhouse-Five
So it goes. Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden and spent twenty years trying to write about it. This is what he finally made.
So It Goes
Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 masterpiece follows Billy Pilgrim, a hapless American soldier who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden from inside a slaughterhouse and has become unstuck in time, experiencing his life in non-sequential fragments that include his postwar optometry career, his alien abduction to the planet Tralfamadore, and the war itself. Vonnegut himself appears as a character explaining in the first chapter that he survived Dresden and has been trying to write about it for years. The result is one of the most original anti-war novels in the English language. It was published the year of the Apollo moon landing and immediately became a phenomenon.
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"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
"Kurt Vonnegut · Slaughterhouse-Five
Vonnegut survived the Dresden firebombing in February 1945 by sheltering in a deep meat locker under the slaughterhouse. He was a prisoner of war assigned to retrieve corpses from the ruins.
The phrase So it goes appears 106 times in the novel, once for each death. Vonnegut used it as a way of acknowledging mortality without being overwhelmed by it. It has become one of literature's most recognised refrains.