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.
I think this is a really cool aspect of this novel, and it makes it a really fun (perhaps the wrong word) one to read. The lack of chronology in the layout certainly makes for an interesting way to consume the story, and the "so it goes" stuff helps creates this bleak aesthetic. Plot and order don't really matter, because everything is as it always was, for better or for worse. So it goes.
ReplyDeleteYour observations on the meaning of "so it goes" are really interesting - it's striking how Billy supposedly finds the Tralfamadorian concept of time to be freeing and interesting, but his Tralfamadorian-like experiences are narrated in such a dry, tired tone.
ReplyDeleteOne effect of "Vonnegut" narrating Billy's experience is that it allows for all this ambiguity as to what's "really happening"--especially at the start, we keep being reminded that all of this is what "Billy says" has happened, as if he'd reported it all to the author. We can either see it as a true report of his experiences, or we can see it as a manifestation of Billy's own trauma.
ReplyDeleteNow, why Vonnegut would invent Billy at all is another kind of question. Given his deep ambivalence about the prospect of delving into this past, it makes sense that Billy gives him a narrative "cushion," and the "unstuck in time" thing keeps letting him pull an "escape hatch" when the narrative gets too intense--like, he really can't imagine writing a book entirely immersed in Dresden, and he "needs" to keep framing the Dresden episodes as only part of a bigger story, "moments" he can visit and revisit, but which remain "stuck in amber." There's maybe a certain comfort in this approach, which is reflected in the "so it goes" shrug: when writing history or memoir, the "events" are sealed in amber, and the writer can't change them by reopening the memories. It's kind of a way of reassuring himself that he bears no responsibility for what happened, and to deal with the idea that there is no rhyme or reason at all behind who lives and who dies.
The "so it goes" aspect went through many stages in terms of I felt about it. At first, it went well as a strong showing of how Trafalmadorian ideals or philosophy applied to the rest of the novel's events. As the saying became more and more common however, it felt at times that Vonnegut was including the phrase for the sake of including it, without adding any value. As the book worn on though, I was able to accept the commitment to the philosophy demonstrated by further usage of "so it goes".
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