Slaughterhouse-Five’s phrase repetition analysis
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is a semi autobiography of the journey of Billy Pilgrim through WWII merged together with time travel and aliens. He sees his own birth and death and everything in between. According to Vonnegut, this book is “short and jumbled and jangled because there is nothing intelligence to say about a massacre” (19). The author uses the repetition of phrases and events, such as “so it goes”, the character wild bob, and the importance of sight, throughout the book to emphasize the meaninglessness of death at wartimes as well as the irony in Billy’s optometrist career.
The most frequently used phrase in the novel, with 109 mentions, “so it goes”, is strategically placed after each and every mention of death in Slaughterhouse-Five. A clear example is on page 106 where Vonnegut claims, “A lot of people were being wounded and killed. So it goes”. The infinite mention of this motif during the novel has many reasons. Billy …show more content…
Wild bob represents the insignificance of death in the war. Wild bob wastes his last words telling someone who isn’t even in his regimen that “if you’re ever in Cody Wyoming, just ask for wild bob” (67). His death fits in with the general theme of the novel which is that the main idea of the war (Nazism, fascism, anti-Semitism) has totally past certain soldiers. Instead, they are caught up in their own fantasies of who they are and what their lives mean up until the moment of their death. On another note, there is also a high chance that the reason wild bob is so significant in the book is that Kurt Vonnegut knew him in real life. This is due to the narrator saying “I was there, so was my old war buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare” (67). Even though most of the time Billy Pilgrim and Kurt Vonnegut are the same person, it is implied that this is Kurt Vonnegut talking and not Billy Pilgrim, giving us insights of his
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is a semi autobiography of the journey of Billy Pilgrim through WWII merged together with time travel and aliens. He sees his own birth and death and everything in between. According to Vonnegut, this book is “short and jumbled and jangled because there is nothing intelligence to say about a massacre” (19). The author uses the repetition of phrases and events, such as “so it goes”, the character wild bob, and the importance of sight, throughout the book to emphasize the meaninglessness of death at wartimes as well as the irony in Billy’s optometrist career.
The most frequently used phrase in the novel, with 109 mentions, “so it goes”, is strategically placed after each and every mention of death in Slaughterhouse-Five. A clear example is on page 106 where Vonnegut claims, “A lot of people were being wounded and killed. So it goes”. The infinite mention of this motif during the novel has many reasons. Billy …show more content…
Wild bob represents the insignificance of death in the war. Wild bob wastes his last words telling someone who isn’t even in his regimen that “if you’re ever in Cody Wyoming, just ask for wild bob” (67). His death fits in with the general theme of the novel which is that the main idea of the war (Nazism, fascism, anti-Semitism) has totally past certain soldiers. Instead, they are caught up in their own fantasies of who they are and what their lives mean up until the moment of their death. On another note, there is also a high chance that the reason wild bob is so significant in the book is that Kurt Vonnegut knew him in real life. This is due to the narrator saying “I was there, so was my old war buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare” (67). Even though most of the time Billy Pilgrim and Kurt Vonnegut are the same person, it is implied that this is Kurt Vonnegut talking and not Billy Pilgrim, giving us insights of his