SO IT GOES...

Throughout the book there is a phrase that constantly comes up: "So it goes." At first I didn't really understood why Vonnegut wrote it. Maybe he just doesn't care about others and every death is just one more death. After having Mr. Gunther go and talk to us during class, I understood the real reason for this phrase. Its actually almost completely backwards to what i had thought. It all connects to the fourth dimension and to the tralfamadorians.
Through the class discussion I got to understand a new concept: the fourth dimension. I may not be like a genius at it or anything but now I have a basic guideline on how it works. Vonnegut included the tralfamadorians in his story to show the reader that there is another way of seeing life. That one is able to perceive it from another point of view, from one in which you don't only see the stars as "lines" instead of "dots" but you also see the complete course of a lifetime. The concept of time doesn't exist in its normal way but is no longer a constraint in life. To the tralfamadorians, life doesn't consist of a future, a present and a past, it consists of something called a time worm, where you see everything at the same time. This way, you get to choose what part of life to see and what moment to "live."
The way in which you live your life must be a very important topic to Vonnegut. Taking into consideration that he was one of the few that survived Dresden, he must have been left with a huge sociological disorder. Understanding this fourth dimension must have kept him a bit calmer because he can, at the same time, acknowledge any moment in any persons life. Therefore, he just chooses to see a certain situation and goes from one to the other, he is unstuck in time. This way of seeing life must be comforting to Billy and therefore to Vonnegut, (I believe Billy is an indirect representation of Vonnegut and what he felt and lived and experienced) because it permits him to see the great moments of all of his friends´ lives. That way when he says "so it goes" it might refer to the end of a persons life line but it doesn't really matter because he can choose to see any point on that line and remember all the loved ones he lost. This way he doesn't have to suffer his past or anything like that, he just time travels in a way that he just looks at life in a way that lets him fight all the pain he´s got inside. So its not that he doesn't care about somebodies death, its just that its really not such a big deal because the death is just one of the many points that make a line and he can travel to any of the other points and choose to enjoy it instead of torturing himself with the loss of his friends.