What is the purpose of these flashbacks?

Throughout this chapter, Esch narrates with particular emphasis on the way in which “bodies tell stories,” continuing her narrative tendency to use simile and flashbacks to emphasize the physicality of her environment (83). Weaving in and out of stories that tie Skeetah’s fresh cuts to memories of her mother’s puffy fish hook scar, Esch uses scars, muscles, and her newly ballooning stomach as a bridge to the past, invoking themes of memory and physical versus mental pain. Junior’s muscles—like “shoestrings”—remind her, for example, of their father’s inattention after their mother’s passing (91).