Slaughterhouse-Five
"So it goes." Billy Pilgrim's unstuck-in-time structure is both a formal innovation and the only honest response to the firebombing of Dresden: there is no narrative that can contain mass death, so the novel does not try. Vonnegut published it in 1969. The anti-war novel that made subsequent anti-war novels possible.
"So it goes" lands after every death in the book, hundreds of times, and for a share of readers the refrain sands the meaning off rather than accumulating it: "So it goes. And goes. And goes. Yawn." The Tralfamadorian abduction plot strikes them as "unimaginative and silly sci-fi ramblings," a cartoon frame diluting the one thing here nobody else could write. Billy never resists, chooses, or acts. The time-jumping reads as "worse than watching ads, gives you a headache" to readers who wanted the Dresden material straight. Women are "ugly, or dull, or only good for sex." And the reputation runs ahead of the pages, a book "famous for being famous."
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
