Slaughterhouse Five Time Travel Quotes

Amolak Plaha
Ms. Castillo
English II 148
Due 14 September, 2015 “So it goes,” is used 106 times in Slaughterhouse Five. In this book Billy Pilgrim is unstuck in time. He finds himself in different places throughout his adventure of time travel. Why is this phrased used so many times? Billy Pilgrim was an ex-soldier who had experienced very harsh events which caused him to get stuck in time and revisit them. Revisiting time can cause one to ignore and find the mishaps and the happiness of life meaningless. Tralfamadorians’s ideas of this phrase was that even though one can die, events in that person’s life can be visited many times only through the invention of time travel. Being unstuck in time, Billy can visit the many events in his life including his death. Due to being unstuck in time makes Billy careless about the importance of life, death, and time. Billy accepts the presence of death and therefore states “so it goes,”after each mention of death. The phrase “so it goes,” is stated once death is referenced. Page 13 states, “The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He was still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountain advents, for instance. They can see how