In this section of the novel, Larry, as narrator of his own past and present, begins to struggle more prominently with the side effects of The Inevitable Distortions of Memory, particularly as they collide with his ongoing efforts at Navigating the Effects of Disillusionment. For years now, during the two couples’ distance from each other, he has held a decidedly negative view of Charity’s habits and mannerisms, inwardly condemning her for preventing Sid from pursuing literary ambitions similar to the ones that have become such an important part of his own life. In essence, he resents Charity for keeping Sid from pursuing the intellectual freedom that he has experienced, even if Larry’s own ambitions never progressed as far as he hoped they would. Notably, he approaches the couples’ reunion with his grudges firmly in mind, prepared from the outset to find aspects of Charity’s demeanor to further dislike and condemn. However, Stegner’s decision to focus on the reunion in such depth places the couples’ entire lives in an entirely new context. 

From the beginning of Part 3 and continuing to the end of the novel, Larry begins to grapple more honestly with his complex emotions toward Charity and Sid. In Chapter 1 of Part 3, Charity’s appearance surprises Larry, who notes that instead of wasting away, she does not appear to have changed at all from his private recollections of her strong-willed mannerisms. In fact, he judges that her imminent death has reinforced and confirmed her domineering image and principles. Because Larry is unable to summon the kind of pity that he typically reserves for the dying, he finds himself rediscovering in Charity something of the friend—and the opponent—he had always known. With his wife’s more generous approach to the reunion, he is also forced to reevaluate his own prejudices, and the women’s effusive greeting compels him to recall the kindness and generosity that Charity often extended along with her strong-willed views. The couples’ candid discussion of Charity’s impending death also puts their relationship in a more nuanced light as they confront the imperfections and inevitable realities of life. 

Yet despite these new developments and the amelioration of the couples’ strained relationship, Larry must also grapple with his lingering feelings of guilt, given his inability to simply put aside all of his resentment of Charity, even so close to her death. In Chapter 2, for example, he learns that Charity has insisted that the family must have their usual picnic, despite her illness. In yet another example of how powerfully Larry’s own editorial biases color his accounts of both past and present, he describes his and Sid’s belief that Charity’s insistence on the picnic is fundamentally absurd in the midst of the current crisis. However, Stegner still manages to indirectly include Charity’s own position on the issue, for when Sid comments, “What right has anybody to tell her she can’t spend her last hours roller-skating, if that’s what she wants?” (296), this hyperbolic rhetorical question identifies the key issue at hand: the importance of Charity’s right to spend her remaining time as she pleases. Something like a picnic might not seem important to the men, but to Charity, it has two meanings. First, she believes that the ritual is more important than her own pain or passing, and she wants everyone must observe the ritual rather than mourning her before she is gone. Second, Charity is newly disabled by this illness, and the picnic is her last attempt to exert her will on the world, thereby retaining her dignity in the face of events that she cannot control. Notably, it is this second meaning that most bothers Sid and Larry, for even as they attempt to accommodate her last wishes, they remain painfully aware that their lives in this moment are bound to her will, as they always have been. In this way, Stegner creates a far more layered portrayal of the four characters than Larry’s perspective alone can accomplish.