I found the ending of LIA to be very fitting seeing as how the story was set up. Sure the story had to do with Byron and Lena, but it seemed that the main focus was on Christmas himself. In order to place importance on these two characters it was an appropriate choice to wrap up the story with them. As we’ve discussed, it was also a comic relief for Christmas’s very disturbing ending. But I also thought it was a very insensitive choice for Lena to be constantly traveling across America. She has a child now and the best thing she could do was give the child some form of stability, instead of relying on the kindness of strangers to take care of them. Maybe once she can find a man that can look past her having a child, that she actually loves she will settle down, but we will never know. It seems she is happy with just herself, never seeming to show any emotion for Byron. It doesn’t even seem as though they’re friends, but still Byron continues to pine for the relationship that will never be. Although our narrator in this chapter is rooting for him, I could not see how, being he was an eyewitness to Lena’s disinterest. In the beginning of the story we see Lena as a bit desperate to find the man whom abandoned her. But, by the end we see her in relation to the Bildungsroman. She realized that Burch was a jerk, and that she could be perfectly happy on her own.  She was also strong enough to walk away from a chance at a relationship with someone stable because she wouldn’t be happy in that relationship. It would seem in her current state, at that current time in history, she would be much more likely to take anyone that would accept her. But no, she wants what she wants and I’d think that she’d be happy even if she never met that special someone. Lena just seemed to be in her own little world the entire novel. She was the only characters seemingly unfazed by the murderer on the loose and never got involved. All she wanted was self-actualization, which she achieved. While on the other hand Byron was trying to do all he could to seem more attractive to her. He was trying to get a murderer away with murder; he helped deliver her baby, found her shelter, all of these things were for naught. In achieving self-actualization it would seem that he could have to let Lena out of his life and say enough is enough, and if you won’t be appreciative of all I’ve done for you and be with me then I’m done. But no, he will just wander with her aimlessly, with his pathetic attempts at flirting until she finds someone else. In the end it seemed as though his life without her was much more stable than life with her. You could say that living a boring life is pathetic and he could have used some adventure, but nay I say. Stable job, good reputation, good work ethic, strong religious ties, seems much better to me than the latter he chose. Trying to do something illegal by lying to the police, getting his butt kicked by Burch, having constant reminders that the longer you spend with this uninterested woman, the longer he’ll remain a virgin, the eventual time where he witnesses Lena fall in love. It just seems as though he was doing the right thing by remaining a stick in the mud. By living this life it seems he is not achieving this character building we all like to see in a novel.