Context of  the novel by  Michael Cunningham who adopted intertestuality in his fiction,

It is a text that connects the lives of three female characters having appearently no relation. It is Cunningham's game-like attitude to the structure of the novel that becomes of interest for the inteligent reader because he/she understands that in a de-centred world the only connection provided by a text which becomes also the survival island for its characters. Thelink and framework is V. WOOLf's Mrs. Dalloway that provides a superb example of the multifaceted identity of Modernist and Postmodernist writers all the same never totally grasped by the same character and the reader as well.

Postmodernism finds in The Hours an effective narrative solution: differently from a Modernist attitude where characters are generally living a quest to find balance or a form of order that might give them a reason for living in the Postmodernist text male and female characters all the same can only display their different aspects since each characters's identity is only provided by the mirror image/s returned by their interlocutor/s.

There exists no unique essence or finite soul, and that is why The Hours is an apporpriate title.
It reminds fragmentation, a dissociation of sensibility where the different identity of one character comes into focus according to context and content: the content of their interactions.

The intelligent reader, therfore, can identify with the essence he/she feels closer to.

There is no protagonist if not the text which starts in the middle of a discourses the characters life is made of.

It follows that M. 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.