Death was a large part of this book. Towards the end of the book, it is noticed that Vonnegut starts to refer to death more and more. It seems to me that death is what this book is based around, but at the same time, I feel like this book is trying to avoid death. The term "so it goes" is repeated a multitude of times in this book, written after any mention of someone or something dying. Although "so it goes" is such a well known and repeated phrase, it seems to me that Vonnegut may be trying to avoid death the whole book. The Tralfamadorians believe that every moment is happening all the time. That nobody ever actually dies, because though they may have died, they still lived and always will live. In some ways, death is nowhere because when you die you are still alive in your memories, but in other ways death is everywhere because "I, Billy Pilgrim, the tape begins, will die, have died, and always will die on February thirteenth, 1976" (Vonnegut, 141).
At one point in the book, Billy is talking to a boy who's father died in Vietnam: "While he examined the boy's eyes, Billy... assured the fatherless boy that his father was very much alive still in moments the boy would see again and again" (Vonnegut, 135). This Tralfamadorian way of thinking about death was a way for Billy to help others and himself while dealing with death.
I wonder if Billy used the Tralfamadorian way of looking at life and death to help him in accepting his own death and any death that he witnessed in his life.
I have never thought about the reasoning behind why Billy looks at death in this way. I think that Billy has experienced so much death in his life that he has to find a way to make death seem ok. In a way, when he think as death as something or someone just not being well in that moment, he desensitizes himself from the reality of the situation. Since death constantly surrounds Billy, looking at in the Tralfamadorian's way is protecting him from they great amount of loss that he has experienced.
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