Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five is widely considered a masterpiece of anti-war literature. One of the reasons for this is his use of the phrase “so it goes.” Vonnegut uses the phrase “so it goes” to ironically comment on the moral evil of war, by understating the impact of death. This use however is ineffective, because for it to be an accurate phrase it would apply not only to moral evils, but also moral goods. Because of this the argument is double sided and self defeating.
Every time that there is a death in the novel, it is suffixed by the phrase “so it goes.” No matter how violent or passive the death, the phrase is represented. The phrase is supposed to follow the line of thinking of a fictional alien race, the Tralfamadorians, who see time in four dimensions. They say that although a person may have died at one point in time, they are still alive in the past. To this end death is not a cause for sorrow, as the person is still alive somewhere in time. Vonnegut is attempting to understate the value of life, in order to make the reader consider the moral toll that war has. His argument is ill constructed however.
Only at one time is the phrase used not referring to death, in which case it refers to a man who used to be a runner but has grown so old that he is hospitalized in a wheelchair. Each time Vonnegut uses the phrase it denotes a degradation of man, or, a preconceived moral evil. If Tralfamadorian philosophy is to be believed however one could (and indeed should) use the phrase “so it goes” to refer to morally good things as well as morally evil. If anything morally good happens to a person it makes no difference because somewhere in time, and in fact in most of time, that person will still be in pain or dead. Vonnegut’s argument is a double edged sword.
One might argue that the Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse-Five are simply more optimistic than humans. The problem with this is that Vonnegut was attempting to make a race that had a completely different moral system than that of human. By placing human moral judgment as the core of Tralfamadorian philosophy however he has actually made it so that Tralfamadorians look at morality in the same way as humans do, but only look at time differently. For their philosophy to make sense they would essentially have to either care about everything or care about nothing. Vonnegut ignores this fact and gives them only basis for commenting on moral evil.
