"After poor Edgar Derby, the high school teacher, was shot in Dresden later on, a doctor pronounced him dead and snapped his dogtag in two. So it goes." (92)
I am going to start by saying that I am not a fan of this new look of Blogger. However, I do like that spell check is now an option. Anyways, in this blog, I will be expressing the motif that is prevalent throughout the novel. Every time someone dies or a story telling of a person dying, it is followed by "So it goes." At first I was a bit annoyed by this recurrence, but I think I understand why it must be that way. The purpose of this motif is to show the effects of war. When someone goes to war, a place where death is an everyday occurrence, one must understand that this is how it is in war. It is the narrators way of saying that death happens, especially in war. People must be able to look beyond death and dismiss it. If one is not hung up over every single death, he is more likely to live through the war. It is effective because it shows one of the many effects of war and how it affects the individuals involved in the horrible experience of war.
The motif of "so it goes" comes from the tralfamadorians. They use it to refer to those who have died, and it is basically a statement of a lack of intimidation, since the tralfamadorians don't lament when people die, because every moment of time exists somewhere, so someone never truly dies. I think the narrator could be using the phrase to express the passive attitudes on war, where people criticize anti-war efforts and say that war is inevitable.
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