Week 2 of Slaughterhouse Five

Here we are in Week 2.  Folks should be around or a little past page 100 of "Slaughterhouse Five".

I've been hearing some feedback on the "so it goes" phrase, I think it would be really interesting if a couple folks would shoot me some text of their own on how they see that phrase (I'm looking at Darryl and Mary when I say that, but it's open to everyone).

The book is reading very quickly for me, maybe 70 pages an hour.  In part that is because the density of the text is quite low, with breaks on nearly every page between the paragraphs and scenes in the book.

Anyone have any observations on vocabulary?  I found this word very interesting: rodomontades (page 121), meaning "boastful or inflated talk or behavior", an archaic term. I find it interesting that the old (compared to the Americans) English officers are described using archaic terminology.

There have been a couple sentences in the book that have really stood out to me, that I believe are really interesting comments.

The first I'll talk about here is on page 128, "So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe.  Science fiction was a big help." Billy is part of "they" in that sentence, and I think it says quite a lot about Billy's circumstances, but I found myself generalizing beyond the book, and thinking about "they" in the abstract, and about how people and even nations re-invent themselves all the time, rephrasing their understanding of their own past using modern or even post-modern vocabulary, thus changing the emphasis and importance of events in their history. I find Rosewater a very interesting character in the novel.

Not far from this sentence, on page 130: "She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all."   I feel this sentence captures something really important in how people interact with each other, with this internalized notion that we "owe" one another some kind of gratitude or perhaps acquiescence, because of what they have done for us (or to us) with no regard to what we might prefer if we could exercise our free will.

One more sentence, from page 149: "So-- " said Billy gropingly, "I suppose that the idea of preventing war on Earth is stupid, too." "Of course."  What a powerful statement! It completely rejects the notion of free will, and reduces the universe to a completely deterministic system.  For the Tralfamadorians, the universe MUST be deterministic, in order to be able to see the entire past and future.  It is very interesting that Billy, who sees the Tralfamadorian planet as peaceful, assumes it is always peaceful, that the Tralfamadorians somehow chose it to be peaceful, and that peaceful is a good or desirable state, compared to the horror he assumes the Tralfamadorians will see war to be.  Very interesting juxtaposition of ideologies.

What do others see thematically in the book, or in single sentences, that they feel speak to them strongly?