So It Goes

Throughout all of Slaughterhouse-Five, and especially in chapter 10, the phrase "so it goes" is used to describe death. Whenever a character, no matter how small or large, dies, the only remark made of his or her death is the story's infamous understatement, "so it goes". The meaning of the refrain can be taken as the obvious Tralfamadorian view of the book, or applied to reality in either a cynical or fatalist fashion. The cynical view would be that Vonnegut does not care about death, that we are all so small and insignificant that none of us is worthy of anything more than 3 words to mark our death, no matter what we did in life. The fatalist view is simply that death happens. Nothing can be done to avoid death, and thus we need not worry about mortality, as it is inevitable and there should be more time spent enjoying life than attempting to prolong it.