Response Paper for the Hours

Response Paper for The Hours

In The Hours, Michael Cunningham is able to intertwine the lives of three, seemingly different women, but as the story unfolds, their similarities begin to show. Throughout the novel, there are themes that continuously reappear. The one theme I thought to be most interesting was the overall idea of valuing time. The novel itself takes place in the span of only one day, a mere twenty four hours. By having the entire story take place in one day, I feel Cunningham is able to further emphasize how important time is and how each hour of the day is filled with infinite possibilities and unknown potential for each of these women.

The character of Laura Brown, a housewife who is beginning to feel the walls of domestication close in on her, looks forward to any time that she can peel away from her everyday life to read Mrs. Dalloway. She cherishes this time so much that she eventually checks herself into a hotel in order to have some quiet time to read. Before she even checks in, however, she knows she only has two hours or so before she must pick up her son. "For an hour or two, she can go wherever she likes. After that, the alarms will start up. By five o'clock or so, Mrs. Latch will begin to worry, and by six at the latest she'll start making calls....but right now and at least for another two hours, really, she is free." (p. 144). She cherishes her time and knows she only has so much. Once she checks out of the hotel later that day, she is thrown back into her reality, one she barely even recognizes "by going to the hotel she has slipped out of her life,and this driveway, this garage, are utterly strange to her." (p. 188).

Clarissa Vaughan, I feel, describes the appreciation of time perfectly in the last sentence of the novel, "We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep -- it's as simple and ordinary as that ...There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there where our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far deeper and