THE HOURS, SITUATION POINT

The Hours is a postmodernism novel written by Michael Cunningham, who adopts  intertextuality as a structure principle in that it is a text that connects the lives of three female characters having apparently no relation.

It is Cunningham’s game like attitude to the structure of the novel that becomes on interest for the intelligent reader because, he or she understands that in a de-centered world the only connection is 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 grasped by the same character and the reader as well.

Postmodernism finds in The Hours it’s realization: differently from a Modernist attitude where characters are generally living a quest to find balance or 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 their interlocutor/s.

There exist no unique essence of finite soul and that is why The Hours is an appropriate title. It reminds fragmentation, a disassociation of sensibility where the different identities of one character come in to focus according to context and content: the content of their interaction.

The intelligent reader therefore can identify with the essence he/she feels 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: and cross section, a network of discourses where it is the reader’s ask to find a possible direction.