Lily’s relationship with Zack expands her understanding of herself and society immensely, especially her greater understanding of the society around her. Her relationship with Zack was a very controversial subject in those times because it was an interracial relationship, she was white and he was black. Before her newfound connection with Zack, she wasn’t as experienced and she has never really been involved first hand with the bias, discriminating, and racist views of society. Of course she knew how people treated minorities but its different when you are actually experiencing the discrimination. It makes you grow as a person if you can get through the hatred and this expanded her understanding of society. Lily also never really thought she would be attracted to someone outside her race, this in turn, affected her understanding of herself a lot. Especially when this is one of her first relationships of her life, she has never felt any feeling before and now all of a sudden she is developing feelings and compassion for this guy. This will make a person have a better understanding of themselves as they develop different feelings and learn how to handle them. For me, when I go through different things in my life especially different feelings, I learn from them and grow. Learning how to manage all the different feelings in your life is key if you don’t want to be an emotional wreck or make bad decisions based on the feelings you’re experiencing at the time. But this all comes through your experience in life unless you have someone there giving you good advice. The other question I am going to answer is what are some examples of characters suffering from the “burden of knowing”. One example is Lily; Lily has the burden of knowing that her mother’s death was kind of her fault. She always has that in her head and this can torment someone for their entire life. Also she later finds out that her mother left her and that her mother did not want her. This is a very big burden on someone and something that people shouldn’t really find out or know. This is a very big “burden of knowing”. This is something someone has to learn to accept or get over because if they don’t this will affect them in different ways their whole life. In the end, societies view in general as a whole has changed tremendously. Now a day’s people are more excepting of interracial relationships. It is really not a big deal and nobody really talks about it anymore from what I’ve experienced. But a few more years down the way I bet it would be almost nonexistent, a thing of the past.