In Slaughterhouse Five, Billy gets his phrase, "so it goes" from the Tralfamadorians. I look at their meaning behind it and I feel it to not be a good way to come to terms with the death of a person. "The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral"(Vonnegut 26). I think what the Tralfamadorians are trying to say here is that they believe there is no reason to be upset because a person still exists in another part of time. They want you to move forward without having to be upset knowing that they the moments they lived in still exist.
Back to chapter one, we hear Vonnegut tell us about his father's death. As a human he is one to mourn it and not shrug it off. He does not say "so it goes" like Billy does throughout the novel, but reacts differently. "Shortly before my father died, he said to me, 'You know – you never wrote a story with a villain in it.'"(Vonnegut 8). He doesn't say "so it goes" afterwards, which leads you to think that he is still mournful over the death. This shows he still looks back, which is exactly why he says he loves Lot's wife for looking back because it was a human thing to do as Vonnegut still does. .
Next, we look at the all-important Adam and Eve scene that Vonnegut lays out for us. Billy is watching a war documentary and we are told he watches it forwards and backwards. We see something miraculous happen as he is viewing backwards. I believe the war is transformed into a beautiful event when it is played in reverse. "The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the plane"(Vonnegut 74). But, as it is played backwards, we realize that when the war is in progress it is a violent and gruesome time.
