The End Does Not Justify The Means.

Slaughter House-Five was a book that makes you realize how war does not make sense. Vonnegut tells this story in a different way not using the usual structure of climax, introduction, etc. Throughout the ten chapters of the book he skips from time and place narrating different experiences that happen to Billy during and after war. “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time” (Vonnegut 22). The first time I read that sentence I did not understand what it meant, know I now that is was Vonnegut way of warning us that he was going to narrate the novel in a nonlinear way.

Billy had come unstuck in time because of the impact war had left on him. When it was over he was lost in his life because he saw no meaning in it. By narrating the novel in a nonlinear way Vonnegut gives Billy a “second” chance to give meaning to some of the moments in his life, allowing him to travel back and forth to them.

“So it goes” appears too many times in this novel. I noticed how almost always when something that was related with death was mentioned, the paragraph ended with “so it goes.” “ In the next moment, Billy Pilgrim is dead. So it goes” (Vonnegut 143). I was told this is an anti war a book but then I asked myself: if this is an anti war book why does Vonnegut talk so carelessly about war? It is another way to show us how war I pointless because even if war does happen and many people die and cities get destroyed life will go on. It’s kind of a way of saying whatever, it does not matter. What the point of having war if life still goes about after it.

I finally understood why the called it an antiwar book. With the way Vonnegut writes his novel. The details he includes in it and how he gives more importance to insignifact things like going to New York to talk on the radio instead of the actual bombing of Dresden sends that message that war does not make sense because life goes on after war.

In the end whatever happens life goes on. “So it goes.”