them and make his time-travels agree with their version of reality. Vonnegut also tries to rationalize and come to terms with the horrors to which he has been a witness. He, like Billy, is torn between the desire to forget Dresden and his obsession with finding a way to reconcile the human suffering he observed there. In an introduction to the novel, Vonnegut makes a comparison of the burning of Dresden to the Biblical destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. He describes a scene where he looks through a Gideon Bible in his motel room for tales of great destruction and he comes to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. "God rained fire and brimstone on the two cities: Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt . . . People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore . . This [novel] is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt" (Vonnegut 21-22). Vonnegut claims that he, too, was turned into a pillar of salt looking back at Dresden, because of his mistake of trying to account for what had happened. He, as a participant, can never gain the cosmic view that would enable him to understand. Nonetheless, Vonnegut tries to find order and logic in what he has experienced. On his revisiting of Dresden, a cab driver who took him back to the slaughterhouse relays holiday wishes to Vonnegut ". . . to meet again in a world of peace . . . if the accident will" (Vonnegut 2). Vonnegut would like to find significance in what happened in Dresden, but after all, it all comes down to a series of accidents (Lundquist 49). Throughout the novel, Vonnegut follows all accounts of tragic events with "So it goes." Whether Vonnegut writes about Dresden schoolgirls boiled alive in a water tower, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., or the Vietnam War, ...
