The Hours- Michael Cunningham Essay

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Using the following quotation from Cunningham’s The Hours, write a 500 word essay that explores the meaning of the novel’s title. The Hours written by Michael Cunningham, follows one day in the life of three woman from different eras. The novel’s title focuses the responder’s attention on time. Throughout the novel this is a theme which is constantly continued to try and make the responder think of the “hours” that make up our own lives and how they are filled. Human mortality and the permeable limits of sickness, life and death is a fascination of the characters in Cunningham’s novel. Cunningham’s quote refers to death and the ways in which death can occur, “jump out of windows... by accident... devoured by some disease.” Richard’s illness causes Clarissa to wonder about the way that time acts on people and tends to change them. It also brings to notice that time is irreversible. Richard’s illness is parallel to his decaying armchair which he refuses to throw out and clings to even though Clarissa refers to it as “being sick”. Holding on to this chair, is like holding on to hope. The search for meaning in the three main characters lives makes them each evaluate suicide and see it as a way of escaping the problems in their life which they face. Some moments have the power to change individuals and their present life or choose to haunt them with threats of what might or could have been. “We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep”; an ordinary layout of a day which like Laura Brown feels relates to her life. She is a housewife and mother and constantly feels that her life is not lived to the fullest, she feels as though she is alienated from life. The importance of the hours which make up a single point in time capture the moments of what a day for the people that live it encounter, learn from and feel. Others such as those who “cherish the city,

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