Michael Cunningham adopted intertextuality as a structuring principle in his novel: in that it is a text that connects the lives of three female characters, having apparently no relations.

It’s Cunningham’s game-like attitude to the structure of the novel that becomes of interest for the intelligent reader, because the intelligent reader understands that in a decentered world the only connection is provided by a text which becomes the survival island for a series of characters. It provides a superb example of a  multifaceted identity never totally grasped by the same character and the reader as well.

Post Modernism finds in The Hours its realization: differently from a Modernist attitude where characters are generally living a quest to find a balance or a form of order, that might give them a reason for living, according to a metaphysical principal, Cunningham's characters, male and female all the same, can only display their different aspects, where one's identity is only provided by the mirror image returned by their interlocutors.

There exists no unique essence or finite soul, and that is why The Hours is an appropriate title.

It's remind 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 he or she feels closer to. There's no protagonist if not the text, which stands in the middle of the discourse. It follows that M. Cunningham's novel might be considered the celebration of textually: a cross section, a network of discourses where the reader's task is to find a possible direction.