Slaughterhouse Five: motif

"So it goes." Kurt

The phrase "so it goes" only shows up on every page of the book. He'll tell a particularly horrifying story, then just throw it at the end and move on. The phrase seems to be his way of downplaying all the awful parts of war he's talking about. I think this is weird considering the whole novel is supposed to be an anti-war story. I would think if you were trying to convince people war was bad that you would talk about all the terrible parts of war to convince people how it should never happen again. But then if you think about actual war veterans, they never really like to talk about it because war scars them and brings up awful memories. I feel like this phrase is his way of deflecting all these awful things, but then again why is he writing a book about it if it's so hard to think about? On the other hand I wonder if this mantra is a statement about the way society views war. Everyone thinks war is inevitable but they don't want to think about all the death and despair so they downplay it and ignore the parts they don't want to think about. That's what this phrase kind of does. It might be a little bit of both, but either way I'm kind of sick of it coming up so often.