So It Goes

It feels like Kurt Vonnegut is reaching across the table, forcing his novel upon me. I can hear him shouting, "Do you see? Do you see what I've done here!"

And I say, "Yes, you've repeated yourself."

"No, you nitwit," he says, rightfully condescending, "I've tricked you. Look again."

His father died in a hunting accident during the war. So it goes.

His wife died accidentally of carbon-monoxide poisoning. So it goes.

The idea was to put a criminal inside and then close the doors slowly. There were special spikes where his eyes would be. There was a drain in the bottom to let out all the blood. So it goes.

He's taken three words and associated them with our greatest fear, but with complete ambivalence. The reader is taught to accept something horrific without sentiment, without remorse. That death is death, and there is absolutely no grace in it. Whether you die or are killed, whether alone or in thousands, by accident or intent; the result is always the same. You are dead.

"But the reader knows it's not true," I say to him. "We don't accept those horrors."

He smiles, nods. "Exactly my point. It's only in the reader that the emotional narrative is written."

I see it now, but as he backs away from the table, he repeats, "Do you see how I've tricked you?"