The Hours is a novel written by Michael Cunningham who adopted intertestuality in his fiction, in that it a text that connects the lives of three female characters having apparently no relation.
It is Cunningham's gemlike attitude to the structure of the novel that becomes of interest for the intelligent reader, because he or she understands that in a decentered world the only connection provided by a text which becomes the survival island for a series of characters, that provide a superb example of the multifaceted identity never totally grasp by the same character and the reader as well.
Postmodernism finds in The Hours its realization: differently from Modernism attitude where characters are generally living a quest to find balance or a form of order that might give them a reason for living according to a metaphysical principle. Cunningham's characters, male and female all the same, can only display the different aspects, where one's identity is only provided by the mirror image returned by the interlocutor/s. There is exist no unique essence or finite soul and that is why The Hours is an appropriated title.
It reminds fragmentation, a dissociation of sensibility where the different identities of one character come into focus according to context and content: the content of their interactions.
The intelligent reader, therefore, can identify with the essence her or she feel closer to. There is no protagonist if not the text which stands in the middle of the discourses. Their life is made of.
It follows that Cunningham's novel might be considered the celebration of textuality: a cross section, a network of discourses where it is the reader task to find a possible direction.