Word: tralfamadorian
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...goes" is a phrase from Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade. It's an expression the Tralfamadorians - a race of four-dimensional aliens - repeat whenever somebody or something dies. It expresses a certain airy resignation about the inevitability of death. Vonnegut - who died Wednesday night at the age of 84 from injuries suffered in a fall - had the Tralfamadorian attitude. "I've been smoking Pall Mall unfiltered cigarettes since I was 12 or 14," he told Rolling Stone last year. "So I'm going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, who manufactured them...
...Redux. But Vonnegut is entertaining: he works with a writing line of aptly terse description prone to break into fragments of anecdote whenever a theme needs developing. And he cuts into the narrative with his own voice, full of pathos expressed in the right phrases. "So it goes," the Tralfamadorian "lament" for death repeated by Vonnegut whenever he's forced to report it, is at first a "would you believe twenty killings?" shtik--only to become a Shantih, Shantih of a different stripe and level...
LISTEN: the most fascinating thing about this book is the way Vonnegut uses the Tralfamadorian understanding of time to deal with the importance of death. Tralfamadore is the planet 446,120,000,000,000,000 miles away, to which Billy Pilgrim is kidnapped. Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments of time in the same way we can look at a whole range of the Rocky Mountains. For those who can travel in time (Billy Pilgrim can and does) any particular moment can be visited. Nothing is "future"; nothing is "past." All moments exist, always have, and always will...
Vonnegut passes on the information that pieces together Billy Pilgrim's life in a Tralfamadorian sense of order, not a chronological one. Instead of telling Billy's life "as it happened," he describes events that might be most enlightening when compared. The actual story of the book depends on the chronology of capture and eventual freedom during World War II. But Vonnegut's ideas don't depend on it--he tells us what the end of the book will be in the first chapter...
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