An illustration depicting Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel Slaughterhouse Five. The drawing aims to echo the non-chronological narrative, the omniscient Tralfamadorian way of seeing. Here is some accompanying text I wrote:
All this happened, more or less.
As a prisoner of war, Kurt Vonnegut Jr survived the February 1945 firebombing of Dresden. This experience forms the basis of his best known work, Slaughterhouse Five.
Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
Bookended by chapters narrated by Vonnegut himself, the novel follows the writer’s semi-autobiographical alter ego, Billy Pilgrim, as he travels haphazardly through time, experiencing events from the past, present and future in non-chronological order.
Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day.
As the narrative flits between decades, we learn simultaneously of Billy’s childhood, his uneasy married life, his experiences of war, his optometry career, and his time spent as a zoo exhibit on the planet Tralfamadore.
Billy Pilgrim says that the Universe does not look like lots of bright little dots to the creatures from Tralfamadore. The creatures can see where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti.
As omniscient beings, the Tralfamadorians dismiss any notion of free will, knowing instead that all moments in time have always been and will always be. Hence, the creatures and subsequently Billy assume an almost fatalistic worldview.
Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “So it goes”.
The acquiescent refrain of “so it goes” appears frequently throughout the novel, employed as a memento mori after any allusion to death. Through use of this device the often humorous tale expresses a subtle pathos, conveys a strange melancholic mix of existentialism and determinism, highlights the senseless inevitability of war, and suggests the only order in a nonsensical world is humanity’s proclivity towards death and destruction.
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