Diction? Or Vocabulary?

What makes every novel unique? The plot?  Yes.  The characters?  Yes.  But there is something that makes every word in every sentence in every novel different, the diction. Right there I could’ve used the word vocabulary instead of diction, but I preferred not to, the small difference in their meaning dissuaded me from doing so.  In the same way, Vonnegut chooses some gnomes over others, they shape the theme of the book.

After having read the majority of the novel, I noticed something new. Kurt Vonnegut uses the maxim “so it goes” many times, but there is a reason for this. He chose that axiom because it fit perfectly into the plot and the narration style that he was using. The informal register that the adage has reflects that of the entire novel. Used 106 times, it is safe to assume that Vonnegut didn’t just use it because he lost his thesaurus... “So it goes” has a conversational tone, as does the novel. “So it goes” creates a pattern that is detached from time, as is Billy’s life. “So it goes” comes after every death, it is passive and emotionless, as Billy is becoming. “So it goes” is the aphorism that represents Vonnegut.

Another aphorism that is often repeated during the course of the novel is “Billy came unstuck in time”, or some deviation from that.  I noticed that this pattern describes Billy Pilgrim’s life, the never-ending and yet never beginning story of acceptance.   I found that Francisco Serna’s blog post “Farewell, hello, farewell, hello” describes this very accurately.  By interpreting the theme of death that the novel has he makes the point that Billy may die in one moment, but he lives in another. Moreover, he compares it to the movie Source Code, this I believe, is where he turned a keen observation into a stroke of genius. This film portrays the idea that someone can live in a moment, die, and then relive the moment.  Francisco brilliantly pointed out this correlation, but he failed to distinguish the time traveling. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy knows the way that he is going to die, he can’t change it. It is because of this acceptance philosophy that the aphorism “so it goes” exists!  He accepts everything. On the other hand, in Source Code the protagonist is trying to change the past/present/future. 

Kurt Vonnegut carefully picked out every word in his novel, which is why every word is meaningful to the overall plot.  Will you change your diction?  Or will you settle for the established vocabulary?