This Is War

So it goes. So it goes. So it goes. Billy Pilgrim had already explained why when someone died he simply said so it goes. But now we are reaching the end of the book and in the last chapter, he says “So it goes” 11 times in 6 pages. This definitely caught my attention a lot, him talking about death and people dying so much. Billy Pilgrim goes back to Dresden with O’Hare after the war. We hadn’t heard anything from O’Hare a long time ago in the book. He actually reads some very interesting facts to Billy Pilgrim in their way towards Dresden. As O’Hare’s little book said,
“On average, 324,000 new babies are born into the world every day. During that same day, 10,000 persons, on an average, will have starved to death or died from malnutrition. So it goes. In addition 123,000 persons will die for other reasons. So it goes.”
It was interesting to read these facts to know about our world and how we are growing, at least how we grew after World War II.
Overall, Slaughterhouse-Five is a very interesting and enjoyable book. It is a fun combination between a Sci-fi book and a war novel. There was a lot of analysis able to be done, and I have to admit many important things that I didn’t notice, for example when Billy talks about Kilgore Trout, I hadn’t noticed that Vonnegut was mocking himself here. The book taught me also about the bombing of Dresden, a massive massacre that honestly, I had no idea about and it was important since around 135,000 civilians lost their lives, this is what war does, it kills innocent people. So it goes.