The Hours - Michel Cunningham

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The fact that they can’t live their sexuality as they want strengthens this feeling of failure. At the end, some characters decide to commit suicide to end with this feeling who is too hard too support. For Virginia it is unviable to stay where she lives and she wants to go back to London; where she commits suicide eighteen years before. “Outside, beyond the glass, Richmond continues in its decent, peaceful dream of itself. Flowers and hedges are attended to; shutters are repainted before they require it. The neighbors, whom she does not know, do whatever it is they do behind the blinds and shutters of their red brick villa. She can only think of dim rooms and a listless, overcooked smell. She turns from the window. If she can remain strong and clear, if she can keep on weighing at least nine and a half stone, Leonard will be persuaded to move back to London.” Laura Brown, by an extern point of view seem like a happy housewife but she thinks for a while about suicide and death in general. “It seems, briefly, that by going to the hotel she has slipped out of her life, and this driveway, this garage, are utterly strange to her. She has been away. She has been thinking kindly, even longingly, of death. It comes to her here, in Mrs. Latch's driveway—she has been thinking longingly of death.” The only character with the lust of life is Clarissa who doesn’t understand this lust of die the other have. “Still, she loves the world for being rude and indestructible, and she knows other people must love it too, poor as well as rich, though no one speaks specifically of the reasons. Why else do we struggle to go on living, no matter how compromised, no matter how harmed? Even if we're further gone than Richard; even if we're fleshless, blazing with lesions, shitting in the sheets; still, we want desperately to live.”

To Conclude, I don’t think that the novel’s characters are unusual but I neither think that it’s the part of life of being sad and have this feeling of failure. I think it depends on the person; the century in which they live also have an importance. Laura and Virginia can’t be happy because of the bad vision of homosexuality of her century but Clarissa can live with Sally. So it depends on every person and every life. In our society, we are constantly comparing ourselves to other because of competition and we rapidly have this feeling of failure.