So it goes.

Eheu, fugaces labuntur anni. Alas! our fleeting years pass away. Vonnegut constantly touches the idea that life goes by quickly. He starts commenting on death on the first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five, saying that as glaciers will always exist, so will plain old death. By the second chapter, he constantly mentions death and continues with the phrase "So it goes." Our fleeting years pass away, so it goes. Life goes by and thats the way it is.


Death and life are very common themes in literature and film. Billy Pilgrim, the main character in this book, talks about how he is "unstuck in time." It is obvious for the reader that he is crazy, thinking that he can travel in time, but what the story is saying is that events in our life makes us look back. This reminds me of The Time Traveler's Wife, a book and later a movie about a man that unintentionally travels in time. This movie questions whether thinking too much about the past or future is good. The past is constantly arising in our minds and affecting the current situations, while the future is always intriguing people and driving them to work for something. Regret from the past or ambition for the future distract us from the present, proposing that one should live focusing only in what is going on. I believe that by "So it goes," Vonnegut is proposing that happiness comes by living in the present because everything else will go by fast. Billy constantly thinks about his past as he's been traumatized, and events in our lives make us look back. Being "unstuck in time" made him crazy. Oscar Wilde said, "No man is rich enough to buy back his past," so focusing on the present is the best choice we have.