Comparing Vonnegut's 'Beyond The Pleasure Principle'

Vonnegut doesn’t only repeat words, scenes, images but he also repeats stories such as the assassination of Billy Pilgrim by a gunman hired by Paul Lazzaro or the execution of Earl Derby for taking a teapot from the ruins of Dresden after the bombing. He mentions them repeatedly throughout the narrative until they become leitmotivs, recurring phrases- like the expression “So it goes”:

I, Billy Pilgrim, will die, have died, and always will die on February thirteenth, 1976. (141)

Addressing the symptomatology of trauma in his book, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud describes the case of a little boy who, traumatized by being abandoned by his mother, reenacted the scene of the trauma over and over and over again. So striking was the event for Freud that it forced him to reconsider his original, relatively unproblematic idea of the pleasure principle, which had indicated that people who experienced traumatic events would avoid them or any object that might recollect the trauma .
And, said Freud, the more powerful the trauma-precipitating event, the more likely that the conscious memory will be repressed as too dangerous for the psychic well-being of the individual, and the more likely that those repressed memories will express themselves in unconscious reenactments of the traumatic event