	Steven Millhauser and Yiyun Li depict obsession as a reality-altering tool that impels the protagonists in “The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman” and “Love in the Marketplace” to navigate through the tumult of their memories and uncover poignant self-revelations.  Paradoxically, as Sansan and the anonymous narrator in Millhauser's story attempt to construct meanings from incomprehensible circumstances, the pivotal discoveries they make while embedded in their delusions enable them to better interpret complex realities and understand suppressed aspects of themselves.  
	From the beginning, reports of Elaine Coleman's disappearance intrigue the town's residents, and the particularities of the case fascinate the story's narrator: he vaguely recognizes the woman in “the photograph, bad and blurry though it was,” as a nondescript girl who attended his high school.  Disquieted by her apparent erasure from reality, he attempts to puzzle out the mystery behind Elaine Coleman.  While distilling factual information about her by reading the local newspapers and studying the evidence that arises from the ongoing police investigation, the narrator's latent memories become another source of information.  
	Compelled to solve the mystery of Elaine Coleman's inexplicable disappearance, his recurring dreams serve as an intermediary layer between reality and his obsessions.  Entering this “realm of dreams” allows him to navigate his past and ferret out the surreal truth behind the missing-person case.  Yet, the memories that resurface in the narrator's dreams appear in fitful confabulations, that is to say as “[pseudo-memories] of Elaine Coleman”,  translating his obsession into tenuous images of her “in dream-disguise”.  It has been hypothesized that the unfamiliar faces seen in dreams are composites of people encountered in waking life, a testament to both the permanency and fluid nature of memory questioned by the narrator:
	An alternative consideration that merits an analysis is the idea that the narrator's obsession may not be the catalyst for his ventures into an otherworld of dreamscape and memory.  One disadvantage of declaring obsession to be the primary cause of this otherworld is that this interpretation demeans the story's surrealism.  Taking into account the narrator's confession and the supernatural nature of Elaine's evanescence, “vanishing, like a room at dusk”,  it is within reason to claim that the surrealist underpinnings are the crux rather than a modular component of Millhauser's story.  In spite of this causal ambiguity, obsession distinctly correlates with the narrator's delusions, as evidenced by his fixation on the Elaine Coleman case.
	Cohering to the posit of obsession as a rudder for navigating reality, Sansan's frequent imaginings of Tu and Min's relationship create for her a composite world separate from reality: a pensive world of obsession in which she contemplates her love for Tu and friendship with Min.  Coupled with these reminiscences is the present world where Tu and Min are divorced and Sansan is on the cusp of a critical point in her life in which she has the opportunity to reunite with Tu.
