Lil

I probably shouldn’t be admitting this- but I actually have yet to finish Slaughterhouse-Five. I still have the last chapter left, but so far, I have counted exactly 77 instances of “so it goes.” I found the continued usage of this phrase really interesting because it just kept coming back – sometimes every paragraph on a page ended in “so it goes.” When I started looking for a theme which tied all the instances together, the only thing I noticed was that it was usually at the end of passages, and much less often in the middle of passages. As I was looking around at articles for my panel presentation though, I read something which I had never thought about, but which is super obvious now – the “so it goes” always comes after the death of someone or something.               I think that the effect of the “so it goes” relates to the entire book as a whole in the irony and the understatement that comes along with it. Every...

I found Charlotte really interesting as a character because crucial to Mumbo Jumbo Reed is its important commentary on cultural appropriation, and Charlotte is one of the most blatant depictions of this phenomenon, especially as it relates to black music and dance. She learns the "The Work" from Papa LaBas, but she then quits and goes on to profit from what she has learned, despite LaBas's protests that "you shouldn't attempt to use any aspect of The Work for profit" (pg 52). The first sentences of Chapter 28 summarize Charlotte's situation well: "Charlotte has struck it wealthy with her Plantation House routine. She possesses a richly endowed apartment as a result of her ability to Stop the Show." Not only is Charlotte - a white woman - gaining success doing the same things that black people are villainized for, but she is doing it with a "Plantation House routine." In short, she is profiting off the oppression of black people and ...