Amongst the opening pages of the novel Little Bee, the character who gives her name to the title, Little Bee, makes a demand of the reader in exchange for the privilege to continue reading the work, proposing of those who makes scars and wish for observers to see those marks as ugly, “You and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty...A scar means, I survived.” (9) And this is true, of physical scars. A scar is a wound that the bearer of has lived long enough for it to superficially heal. However, this notion is not as directly applicable to the most sinister of scars, those that ravage the minds and emotions of their bearers, those that well never fully be healed; scars of the mental variety. These are the…show more content… For Little Bee's life, Sarah physically surrenders “the E, D and C keys on [her] laptop.” (25) That is, Sarah pays the armed man's ransom of her left middle finger for Little Bee's life, a ransom—as previously mentioned—Andrew refused to pay. In doing so, Sarah clearly benefits Little Bee's life, as she mortgages her finger for it to continue, and diminishes her own, as she loses a digit that is particularly useful in her line of work. As a result of this the reader observes Sarah develop as a willful individual willing to sacrifice her own comfort for the potential of continuation of the life of a complete stranger. However, this wound is physical, and thus will heal to beautifully represent selflessness and survival, the latter of both Sarah and Little…show more content… This elicits extreme negative tension between the two, and, due to their collective closeness with Sarah, the tension in their relationship inevitably affects the relationship between Lawrence and Sarah. Sarah declares of the relationship between the three of them, “We really have to make this work,” (197) but it can not, as she later observes, “There's a tension though...I can feel it.” (206) In fact, the effect on Lawrence and, more so, Sarah that Little Bee has is explicitly discussed in the novel by Sarah and Lawrence, simultaneously redefining the nature of their relationship through substantial conversation and defining, for the reader, what it means to develop as a person and, thus, character. Sarah profoundly states, “You start off thinking you can kill all of the baddies and save the world. Then you get a bit older, maybe Little Bee's age, and you realize that some part of the world's badness is inside of you...And then you get a bit older still, and a bit more comfortable, and you start wondering whether that badness you've seen in yourself is really all that bad at all,” to which Lawrence replies, “Maybe that's just developing as a person.” (209) Thus interaction with Little Bee initiated what Sarah and Lawrence collectively define as Sarah's development, and Little Bee plays a key benchmark role in that development's