Does the plot slow down and speed up in places) explain where and why this happens.

The novel is divided into four parts and forty-two chapters. Each of the chapters is short, some as little as a paragraph long, while others are five or six pages long. The story is told in a linear fashion with only a few chapters that contain flashbacks in order to allow the reader to see events from the narrator's past as the narrator experienced them. The book is written with equal amounts of exposition and dialogue, with all the thoughts expressed throughout the novel those of the narrator alone, indicative of the first-person narrative form.