	When pursuing the topic of marriage, Sansan's mother recognizes her daughter's visionary ideas about love with what can be construed as condescension: “What do you want, then, Miss Romantic?” Governed by romanticism rather than practicality, Sansan observes the flippant behavior of the students in her English class and marks with contempt their trifling desires to educate themselves solely to avoid field labor.  Sansan's unconventional expectations and outlook are determinants that cast her as the town eccentric; she thrives on isolation and ennobles herself for sacrificing her future with Tu.  This conceit of herself as “a guardian angel that blesses and curses [Min and Tu] with her forgiveness” and the noble mien she carries make Sansan's life tolerable.  She tries to assemble meaning from the devastation of her life, thus imposing a sense of order and serenity on otherwise lamentable events:
	The sunflower seeds Sansan compulsively devours are a physical manifestation of the meaning construction she engages in to circumvent reality.  Eating sunflower seeds becomes a ritual Sansan uses to mitigate her obsession, comparable to the dream-plumbing the narrator in Millhauser's story uses to find meaning in Elaine's disappearance.  The seeds Sansan consumes induce a fuguelike state through which she transcends her present reality and pacifies her rampant imagination.  She realizes that her fantasies are laced with opium, and divines from her mother's words about arranged marriages that even her love for Tu is infected with deceit. 
	Obsession and their respective fantasies lead Sansan and the unnamed narrator to epiphanies about themselves and those around them.  Sansan discovers that even reality abounds with false conceptions: her idealization of Tu has been foisted on her since childhood by her mother's cultivation of their love.  In a similar vein, the narrator in Millhauser's short story professes his guilt in Elaine Coleman's murder after concluding that the town's criminal indifference caused her to fade “irrevocably toward the realm of dream”.  Likewise, by tracking through the myriad realities of fiction and binding ourselves in the memories of other worlds, we become attuned to the complexities of life in our own world.
