"And So it Goes"

The novel I will be writing about is "Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut. It is important to me as a piece of literature for several reasons, not the least of which is that it was the first piece of school-assigned literature that I felt had a large emotional impact on me.

The book is, in a phrase, mildly disturbing. It speaks of the horrors of war in a way that is disjointed and separate from what is occurring, while also casting a clear lens upon those horrors. It is like watching the film of JFK's assassination. You witness a man's death, see the blood shoot from his head, and even see the panic afterwards. But as real and as horrifying as the image is, you are still so far away from it.

Slaughterhouse Five changed the way that I read books. I didn't read that book because I was enjoying the story. The story is disjointed and difficult to follow. The main character jumps around in time, creating a set of small, strange vignettes that surround a truly horrible war story. And yet, the emotions that it causes in the reader are real. The feeling of confusion and disorientation is purposeful and a mighty tool in Vonnegut's arsenal for telling this story. You feel exactly as certain of what is happening to this man, as he himself is.

And through all of this horror, the words of the strange aliens that have such a central place in the plot echo after every single tragic death: "So it goes." The deaths are violent and cruel, yet immediately dismissed in a way that makes you want to scream at the pages that they deserve some proper eulogy because they were people and no one deserves to die like that and be so handily dismissed. And in that moment, you recognize the sanctity of life. And you feel the weight of inevitability. And you feel the sadness of loss.

It is rare that pieces of "school" literature make me feel real emotions. This one, however, has haunted my thoughts for years since I first flipped through its pages.