The Hours

Michael Cunningham adopted intertextuality in the novel, 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 become of interest for the intelligent reader because he understands that in a decentred world the only connection is provided by a text which becomes the survival island of 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 Hour its realization: differently from a 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 their different aspects where one’s identity is only provided by the mirror image returned by their interlocutor/s. There exist no unique essence or finite soul and that is why The Hours is an appropriate 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 he or she feels closer to.

There is no protagonist if not the test which stands in the middle of the discourses.

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’s task to find a possible direction.