i
- Sad news: Maud dies, apparently from cancer.
- Plunkett looks over the love letters he's written to her—she was reading them when she died—then he lays down next to her body on the bed, filled with grief.
ii
- Plunkett is sorting through memorabilia from Maud's tea chest, spinning through a lifetime of events and experiences.
iii
- The narrator explains the origins of Plunkett and Maud as characters—he casts them as his own parents—and then he positions himself as Telemachus, the son of Odysseus who suffers from the absence of his father.