How to use "So it goes"

It was interesting at Billy's anniversary party when Trout was making a story up off of the top of his head when he was talking to a women named Maggie. "Trout was making this up as he went along. 'Just before the casket is closed, the mourners sprinkle parsley and paprika on the deceased.' So it goes" (p.171). Trout was lying to the woman about this book which didn't exist, where characters who never existed died and they had a funeral. But, Billy still had to say "so it goes" when trout said "the deceased".  How could something that was never living die? Was billy commenting on the idea that would die because it would never be made into a book? Billy has to "so it goes" whenever anything mentions death, but that is because a life never truly dies. It just gets replayed by time travel. The moment when this happens will be replayed in Billy's mind, but is the character in a book that doesn't exist really dead if it was never alive to begin with? I don't think it really died, so Billy should not have to say "so it goes".

The Evolution of Ourselves

On page 87, Billy Pilgrim explains how the Tralfamadorians see humans throughout their lives. "They see them as great millipedes-- 'with babies' legs at one end and old people's legs at the other." The Tralfamadorians see us as every point in our lives in a line. We start as babies and move through our lives until we are old and die. The Tralfamadorians see the evolutions of ourselves throughout our lives that we will never see. We take school photos every year and our own photos, but Tralfamadorians see the evolution of us through every day, minute and second. What if we could see like the tralfamadorians? We would see everything a person has done in their lives. Every time they laughed, drove their car, cried, ate, walked and so on. To see the evolution of someone, you would see every part of that person. Tralfamadorians see all of us, but we can only see certain moments of each other.

Tralfamadore; Billy's pretend world

Billy Pilgrim time travels through all different places and times throughout the book, and claims he is abducted by tralfamdorians. I think that Billy is definitlty imaging the whole tralfamdorian experience. When Billy is on planet Tralfalfamadore he "learns new things", but in reality, he is just remembering and looking back on things he had already learned. For example, the locket that Montana Wildhack wore with the quote "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to chant the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference." (Vonnegut 209) But this poem was also used in chapter 3 when Billy was reading the posters on his office wall at work. Billy used Tralfalfamadore as an alternate reality. He came up with the setting when he started reading Kilgore Trouts sci-fi books, and has taken little pieces of his daily life to create this world. A world he wants to live in. 

Poo-tee-weet?

In the book,  the phrase "Poo-tee-weet?", is used many times. I believe that the meaning of this is to let the reader understand that there is nothing else to say. When this phrase is used it is most often after a massacre or time of horror, and poo-tee-weet is the only way to describe the awful and terrible things that went on. There is nothing that can really describe the Dresden bombing so Vonnegut uses poo-tee-weet, because there is no answer. It is used again at the end of the book, outside of Billy's hospital window, when he is in Dresden retrieving souvenirs. It signals the end, the war is over and the only way to describe it was with "poo-tee-weet?" 

Throughout the book it also says that everything was so awful that the birds stopped speaking. And the last line of the book a bird says "poo-tee-weet?" The birds finally started talking again. And possibly, things were looking up. 

But why did Vonnegut choose the words poo-tee-weet, why not just a chirp of a bird? What is the significance of using those three words?

Blue and Ivory

There are many references to blue and ivory in the book and how beautiful it is, even though it is describing a person. Imagining someone to be ivory and blue, the first thing you would imagine is definitely not beautiful and serene in any way, but the way Vonnegut used the words, it gives you a sense of calmness and beauty. "His bare feet were blue and ivory. It was all right, somehow, his being dead. So it goes." (Vonnegut 148) My question is why did Vonnegut describe these moments with a sense of beauty? What was the reasoning? And what is the significance of blue and ivory? It is brought up many times, but always quite subtlety, why is that?

Free Will On Earth

"I've visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports of one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will." (p. 86) In this part of the book, Billy is speaking to the Tralfamadorians, and one is explaining that humans are the only species he has found that has free will or independence. What does the Tralfamadorian mean by this? And how does this relate to Billy Pilgrim and the story of the Dresden fire? Earlier, Kurt Vonnegut talks about not looking back, but he does anyway, could this have anything to do with the fact?

"How did I get so old?"

In Chapter two, Billy travels in time to when he saw his dying mother in a nursing home. She had no life left in her but she mustered up the strength to say "How did I get so old?" (p. 44) This is a question that is asked by most people as they age, even if they are only ten years old. The question everybody has is how did life pass so quickly and leave me here all grown up? We all have a sense of the time traveling that Billy can do. We usually don't realize how fast a moment can pass until it is already gone. To Billy, his life is just moments that pass and go. In one moment, he is a boxcar with a hobo and the next moment he is at a wedding. To us, moments can pass as quickly as Billy's, but just in order.  In the end though, Billy and his mother and everyone else in the world feels the same and worries how they left their lives pass so quickly without a thought.