Over the course of the book I’ve been thinking about the narration as well as how the “so it goes” plays into the book. We were talking a bit about it in class on Thursday but that discussion just made me a bit more confused. So, this is being narrated by Vonnegut, but it’s the story of Billy. And, we were trying to think about if it made sense that Billy has schizophrenia or PTSD from the war and that’s why the story is laid out the way it is. I feel like that would make sense if Billy was the narrator, but Vonnegut makes himself sort of a fictional character and then narrates, so he wouldn’t have to follow all the time jumps that Billy went through if he didn’t want to. I also wonder how the narrator would have gotten all this knowledge about Billy. It makes sense that he probably heard a lot of it second hand and is just retelling the story. At first, that was one of my initial impressions of the “so it goes”. It just seemed like someone was trying to tell a story as secondary source and they were trying to say that they weren’t the primary source by saying, “at least that’s how I heard it went.” But, the discussion yesterday gave me a new thought that maybe Vonnegut is somehow also with Billy through all of this. It seems like he’s been doing this warping with Billy for a long time and the “so it goes” sorta is just like a “here we go again”. He’s tired and knows how everything is going to go except he doesn’t know about when the time warps are. He seems sorta worn out by reliving all these experiences. I started writing my blog post before my class’ panel presentation that talked a little bit about this and Vonnegut having these time travels and imaging Billy makes sense.Vonnegut doesn’t want to think about the passage of time and death. The panel presentation made a good point that Vonnegut really distances himself from the story of Dresden by making himself a character and then creating Billy and then Billy sorta “creating” tralfamadore.
