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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.
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:INFO
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.


:JOURNEY
Reading Slaughterhouse-Five
3 Confessional
4 Surreal
3 Strange
5 Hollow
3 Absurd
4 Exhausted

:QUOTE [quotetype:plain, subtitle:Kurt Vonnegut]
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.


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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.
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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.


:LINK
https://www.google.com/search?q=Slaughterhouse-Five+Kurt+Vonnegut+book
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