Themes in Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy
Meaninglessness
and Happiness
Throughout The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a story about a
human man named Arthur who hitchhikes
through space, many characters try to find meaning in their lives and search
for the significance of their own existences. As they focus on discerning the
meaning of life, though, their happiness decreases, and their efforts to eke out
an existential purpose ultimately prevent them from enjoying life. By
illustrating many fruitless attempts to formulate an understanding of
existence, Douglas Adams suggests that such lofty philosophical considerations
often obscure the actual experience—and pleasure—of being alive in the first
place. The most successful and happy people, he implies, are those who accept
life as a nearly meaningless experience, something that just is. No matter how hard people (a word Adams uses even
when referring to aliens) strive to understand life, they will seemingly never
fully comprehend its supposed purpose. As such, Adams intimates that such
considerations often produce little more than unnecessary agony, frustration,
and confusion.
In the very first
chapter, Adams prepares readers to contemplate the superficial ways that people
assign meaning to otherwise arbitrary concepts. Describing Earth, he writes:
“Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many
solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely
concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd
because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were
unhappy.” The mere fact that humans spend most of their time proposing
“solutions” to unhappiness indicates the extent to which they analyze the
nature of their experience as living beings. Unable to discern what exactly is
making them so unhappy, they attach meaning to something tangible: money.
Adams’s choice to call money “small green pieces of paper” emphasizes how
absurd it is to superimpose meaning onto something as meaningless as a dollar
bill, which is nothing more than “paper.” By beginning the novel with this
observation, Adams spotlights humanity’s desperation to find things in life
that carry symbolic weight. Unable to reach more profound answers about their
own unhappy existences, people turn to their worldly possessions in order to
alleviate their discontent. In the end, though, this does nothing to change the
fact that they’re unhappy. Instead of simply living their lives, they
frantically grasp for meaning by investing themselves in material items that
ultimately do nothing to address their discontent.
While humans try to
alleviate their existential unhappiness in simple materialistic ways, other
races in the galaxy work more directly to discern the meaning of life. Adams
explains: “Millions of years ago a race of hyperintelligent pandimensional
beings […] got so fed up with the constant bickering about the meaning of life
[…] that they decided to sit down and solve their problems once and for all.”
Determined to finally understand existence—its purpose, its underlying
significance—they design a supercomputer called Deep
Thought that
is (at the time) the smartest computer in the galaxy. Unfortunately, Deep
Thought takes 7,500,000 years to tell these beings the answer to “Life, the
Universe and Everything.” When the computer is finally ready to deliver the
answer, the “hyperintelligent” beings rejoice, saying, “Never again will we
wake up in the morning and think Who am I? What is my
purpose in life? […] For today we will finally learn once and
for all the plain and simple answer to all these nagging little problems of
Life, the Universe and Everything!” By showcasing this desire to finally answer
vast existential questions, Adams demonstrates how obsessed seemingly all
living beings can become with finding meaning. Indeed, without an “answer” to
their endless questions, these beings are “nag[ged]” by the “problems of life.”
Rather than approaching life as something that doesn’t necessarily have to mean anything, they agonize about the
specific conditions of existence.
Despite the
determination of these “hyperintelligent” beings to pinpoint the meaning of
life, Adams demonstrates the absurdity of thinking that there’s a “plain and
simple answer” to something as complicated as existence. He does this by
providing an answer that is so simple it ridicules the very notion that any response could ever help somebody understand
the meaning of life. Indeed, the “answer” to “Life, the Universe and
Everything,” Deep Thought asserts, is the number 42. This is an ironic
moment, since the “hyperintelligent” beings clearly see life as so complicated
that they need a supercomputer to understand it. Deep Thought’s answer, though,
is simple—so simple that the beings who asked the question can’t even discern
how it relates to anything at all. In this way, Adams emphasizes the
pointlessness of obsessing over such lofty existential questions. After all,
even a simple and tangible answer doesn’t do anything to help the
“hyperintelligent” beings make sense of life.
Rather than giving up
and embracing the idea that existence doesn’t need to
mean anything, the “hyperintelligent” beings refuse to let go of their
obsession. Deep Thought explains to them that the reason they don’t understand
the answer to life is because they don’t truly understand the question they’re
asking. As such, they tell Deep Thought to build another computer that can
explain this question to them—this “computer” is the earth, and it will take
10,000,000 years to finish the problem. Without hesitation, the
“hyperintelligent” beings embark upon this absurd project, dedicating millions
of years to their ridiculous fixation. This, Adams implies, is the kind of
monomania that overshadows life itself. These beings could simply accept that
they’ll never know the true meaning of life, but instead they waste time
working toward an answer.
This obsession is
worth juxtaposing with the lackadaisical attitude of Zaphod Beeblebrox,
who’s arguably the most content character in the novel. In fact, his
girlfriend, Trillian, even begins “to
suspect that the main reason he had had such a wild and successful life was
that he never really understood the significance of anything he did.” Rather
than getting hung up on finding “significance,” Zaphod simply takes life as it
comes. Because of this, he has had a “successful” and enjoyable life, whereas
the “hyperintelligent” beings have spent millions of wretched years hell-bent
on studying existence. In turn, Adams shows that embracing a sense of
insignificance and meaninglessness can actually help a person lead a happier
life.
Power
and Control
The characters
in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy frequently confront
issues of power. For Arthur
Dent, this means learning
to accept that he is powerless against humanity’s apathetic bureaucracies and
even more powerless in the face of the alien races he
encounters after earth is destroyed. Adams frames authority and power as
abstract and inaccessible. In the same way that Arthur can do little to stop
the state from destroying his house and building a bypass, he can do nothing to
prevent the Vogon alien race from obliterating earth itself. Worse, he later
learns that the entirety of human life has been an experiment manipulated by—of
all creatures—mice. Although humans always believed they were
the ones running tests on mice, it has apparently been the other way around:
mice have been controlling all of humanity for 10,000,000 years. As such,
Arthur suggests that true power over others comes when people don’t even know
the nature of their own oppression. Keeping power and authority hidden, he
suggests, is the most effective way of subjugating a population.
The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy opens
with a small-scale example of how people can gain authority over one another by
making the engines of their own power appear vague or inaccessible. When Arthur
Dent discovers that his house is about to be demolished to make way for a new
bypass, it is already too late. This is because news of the construction
project was made virtually inaccessible to him. “But Mr. Dent,” Mr.
Prosser,
the foreman, says, “the plans have been available in the local planning office
for the last nine months.” In response, Arthur says: “Oh yes, well, as soon as
I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn’t
exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like
actually telling anybody or anything.” Mr. Prosser claims that the “plans were
on display,” but Arthur points out that the plans were “on display in the
bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on
the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.’” It becomes clear that whoever made
the plan to demolish Arthur’s house actively wanted to use the gears of
bureaucracy to keep the project out of the public eye. As a result, Prosser is
able to say that the plans have been “available” for “nine months,” thereby
intimating that Arthur is the one who is at fault for not being diligent enough
to inform himself of the matter. In this way, Prosser gains the upper hand in
their argument, despite the fact that Arthur has clearly been cheated.
Completely unaware that his house is set to be torn down, he has had no time to
prepare an argument, so the only thing he can in the moment is lie down in
front of the bulldozer—a technique that, although effective in the short-term,
is rather weak.
Unbeknownst to both
Arthur and Prosser, there are other forces of power afoot that are greater than
their own. They discover this when the Vogon alien race arrive in their large
spaceships and hover above the earth, announcing that they’re going to destroy
the planet in order to build a “hyperspatial express route.” In an argument
similar to the one Arthur and Prosser have just had, the Vogons say: “There’s
no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and
demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department in
Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to
lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about
it now.” In the same way that plans for the demolition of Arthur’s house were
hidden away so that he wouldn’t be able to do anything to interfere, the Vogons
have posted their “planning charts” on a planet that is inaccessible to
humankind. As such, humanity hasn’t even known to stand up for itself against
the powerful Vogons. In turn, Adams illustrates that one party’s ignorance can
be another party’s opportunity to assume power and control.
As if it isn’t bad enough that Arthur has
to come to terms with his home planet’s annihilation, he soon learns that
humankind has been under the control of another species for the entirety of its
existence. When he goes to the planet Magrathea, an old luxury-planet designer named Slartibartfast explains to him that mice—who are
actually a “hyperintelligent” race of “pandimensional beings”—have been
experimenting on humans. Unsurprisingly, Arthur finds this ridiculous, trying
to explain to Slartibartfast that humans are the ones who have
been experimenting on mice. “Such subtlety,” Slartibartfast muses,
continuing by saying: “How better to disguise their real natures, and how
better to guide your thinking. Suddenly running down a maze the wrong way,
eating the wrong bit of cheese, unexpectedly dropping dead of myxomatosis. If
it’s finely calculated the cumulative effect is enormous.” By saying this,
Slartibartfast reveals that mice have been purposefully deceiving humans as a
way of gaining power over them. Similar to how Arthur Dent didn’t know his
house was in danger and thus was unable to fight the plans, humans have gone
through life completely unaware of the fact that they are under the control of
mice. In fact, they’ve considered themselves to be the ones in power, thereby
deepening their ignorance of their own helplessness. Once again, then, Adams
shows how effective it is to hide the engines of power. In an ironic twist,
though, the mice are so preoccupied with their experiment that they fail to
take note of the Vogons’ “planning charts,” which indicated that earth will be
destroyed. As such, their 10,000,000-year experiment on earth is laid to waste
when the planet is demolished, and they become victims of the very same kind of
power tactic that they themselves used to control humankind: obfuscation.
In The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the galaxy is a place where seemingly
anything can happen. In fact, Adams goes out of his way to upend readers’
expectations about storytelling. To do this, he bases one of the novel’s most
important plot points on a spaceship that operates according to improbability,
impossibility, and coincidence. Although he goes through the motions of
explaining how the spaceship’s “Improbability Drive” functions, his explanation
relies heavily on unfamiliar concepts that force readers to move through the
novel without a complete scientific—or even logistical—understanding of the
very components that drive the story. As such, he plays with the conventional
narrative form, challenging the idea that fiction has to be plausible,
realistic, or predictable. In doing so, he also allows readers to experience
the same kind of surprise and disbelief that protagonist Arthur
Dent undergoes when
he first leaves Earth and learns about aliens. By employing utter absurdity,
Adams puts readers in a position of incredulity and skepticism, effectively
simulating Arthur’s shock and advocating for open-mindedness in the face of
even the most incomprehensible circumstances.
Adams creates a
highly unlikely plot, one that tests the limits of readers’ willingness to
suspend their disbelief. For instance, when earth is destroyed by the Vogon
alien race, Ford
Prefect and
Arthur Dent become secret stowaways on the Vogon spaceship. However, it isn’t
long until the Vogons find them and jettison them into space. Although the
chances (according to Adams) are 2^276,709 to 1 in favor of them dying while
free-floating in space, Arthur and Ford are intercepted by Zaphod’s spaceship, Heart
of Gold.
This is because the spaceship uses something called the Infinite Improbability
Drive, “a wonderful new method of crossing vast interstellar distances in a
mere nothingth of a second.” It’s worth noting here that Adams uses an invented
measure of time, a “nothingth of a second.” Given that this made-up value is
used to describe such a critical logistical detail—a detail that accounts for
how the protagonists escape death—it’s clear that Adams is not interested in
enabling readers to understand the novel’s internal logic.
What’s more, Adams
only adds to the confusion when he explains the concept of “infinite
improbability.” He writes: “The principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability
by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain to an
atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a
nice hot cup of tea) were of course well understood.” However, he continues, physicists
maintained that “infinite improbability” was “virtually
impossible.” But then one day a young student proved them wrong; “If, he
thought to himself, [an infinite improbability] machine is a virtual impossibility,
then it must logically be a finite improbability.” This meant
that “all” this student had to do to make an infinite improbability machine was
“work out exactly how improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite
improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea…and turn it on!”
At this point, the majority of readers most likely have stopped tracking
Adams’s pseudo-scientific explanations, since it’s clear they’re not meant to
be taken seriously (after all, his comic tone immediately appears in words like
“Bambleweeny” and when he suggests that such a machine should float in “a nice
hot cup of tea”). And even if readers have followed Adams’s
logic, the explanation doesn’t actually provide any insight into how an
improbability machine works—the devices he mentions are fictional, and the
explanation hinges on the student’s sardonic interpretation of the term
“virtually impossible,” which makes the explanation more of a joke about
language than an actual scientific answer. As such, “infinite improbability”
remains an abstract concept.
As if it’s not already clear that Adams
doesn’t intend for readers to understand the logic behind how Arthur and Ford
are saved, Zaphod and Trillian decide to calculate just how
improbable it was for their ship to intercept these two free-floating
humanoids. When Trillian “punch[es] up the figures,” she arrives at
“two-to-the-power-of-Infinity-minus-one,” which Adams admits is “an irrational
number that only has a conventional meaning in Improbability Physics.” Given
that “Improbability Physics” isn’t a real field, it becomes even more apparent
that Adams wants to firmly situate the logic underlying The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in a highly fictional realm, one that
can only be understood on its own terms. Considering that the novel’s primary
protagonist, Arthur, is an earthling hurdling through space, it’s unsurprising
that Adams wants to keep readers from fully understanding how the elements they
encounter function—he wants readers to experience the same kind of dumbfounded
awe Arthur no doubt feels as he witnesses an entirely foreign reality. Indeed,
the author encourages an extreme suspension of disbelief by making it
impossible to fully follow the book’s internal logic, which is itself concerned
with working out the internal logic of the very idea of impossibility. In this
circular way, Adams forces readers to approach the novel with an open-minded
sense of wonder rather than with a rigid and literal-minded outlook.
Knowledge and Exploration
The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy often focuses on the pursuit of
knowledge. Although Adams advocates for an acceptance of meaninglessness in the
face of lofty existential questions, he also makes it clear that the impulse to explore such questions—to seek out
knowledge—is a natural and inevitable part of being alive. In fact, he even
suggests that this process of exploration and discovery is often more enticing
than the act of actually settling on an answer. For example, the
“hyperintelligent beings” that come to earth as mice are unrelenting in their
efforts to understand the meaning of life, such that the very process of
inquiry overtakes their aspirations to find definitive answers. Their
philosophers are so wrapped up in contemplating life’s questions that they try
to stop their fellow beings from building a computer—Deep
Thought—that
will provide an answer to “Life, the Universe and Everything.” This is because
they want to continue debating the answer, and they know that any conclusion
will put an end to their otherwise endless deliberations. Fortunately for them,
Deep Thought needs 7,500,000 years to find the answer to “Life, the Universe
and Everything,” thereby giving them a chance to postulate their own theories.
This delights them, as they rejoice at the opportunity to simply keep exploring
the topic of life. In turn, Adams suggests that the pursuit of knowledge is an
activity that people take part in for its own sake. Spotlighting the ways
living beings engage in intellectual discourse, he ultimately emphasizes that
the desire to explore new ideas is often greater than the desire to secure
actual answers.
Just before the mice
are about to ask Deep Thought to tell them the answer to “Life, the Universe
and Everything,” Adams demonstrates that some people—especially those who have
committed their lives to knowledge and exploration—don’t actually want to hear
such answers. This is made clear when two philosophers named Majikthise and Vroomfondel burst
into the room and try to stop Deep Thought before he responds. “You just let
the machines get on with the adding up, and we’ll take care of the eternal
verities, thank you very much,” Majikthise says to one of the mice who built
Deep Thought. “You want to check your legal position, you do, mate. Under law
the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of
your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we’re straight out of a job, aren’t
we? I mean, what’s the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there
may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives you his bleeding
phone number the next morning?” According to Majikthise, machines should be
used to solve simple problems, like those that revolve around “adding up”
various numbers. Because he has devoted his entire life to “sitting up half the
night arguing” about grand unanswerable questions, he doesn’t want Deep Thought
to arrive at definitive conclusions about, for instance, the existence of God.
Echoing this sentiment, his colleague adds: “That’s right, we demand rigidly
defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!” Of course, this is a rather humorous
“demand,” since “doubt and uncertainty” are by their very definitions vague and
thus not “rigidly defined.” But this is precisely what the philosophers want to
preserve: the kind of vagueness that invites intellectual exploration.
The philosopher mice
aren’t the only characters in The Hitchhiker’s Guide
to the Galaxy who avoid definitive answers while still pursuing
knowledge. Indeed, Zaphod embarks upon an
entire mission of exploration and discovery without even knowing what, exactly,
he wants to get out of the experience. This is because he has gone into his own
brain and rewired his synaptic network so that he won’t know why he wants to
become president of the galaxy, steal the Heart
of Gold spaceship,
and find Magrathea, an
old planet nobody believes exists. “I freewheel a lot,” he tells Arthur, Ford, and Trillian. “I get an idea to
do something, and, hey, why not, I do it. I reckon I’ll become President of the
Galaxy, and it just happens, it’s easy. I decide to steal this ship. I decide
to look for Magrathea, and it all just happens.” However, he doesn’t know why he gets the “idea to do something.” Wanting
to get to the bottom of this, he eventually runs a battery of tests on himself
and finds his own initials cauterized into his brain tissue, right where an
alteration was made that essentially makes it impossible for him to determine
why he wants to do the things he’s doing. Because government officials run
tests on the brain of any incoming president, Zaphod guesses that he
purposefully altered himself so that no one would detect his plans to find
Magrathea. As a result, though, he doesn’t know why he wants to find Magrathea.
And yet, he pushes onward, undeterred. As such, his quest to find the planet
takes on its own significance, as he blindly follows his impulse toward
investigation. Rather than seeing exploration as a means to an end, Zaphod
allows the process of discovery to be
an end in and of itself. In turn, Adams presents the process of exploration and
discovery—and the pursuit of knowledge—as an experience that is worth indulging
even when its underlying reasons aren’t readily apparent.
Language and Communication
Many linguistic
interactions in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy accentuate
the inherent shortcomings of language. Moreover, the characters’ failures to
communicate effectively with one another demonstrate how difficult it can be to
rely on language when trying to connect with others, especially when a
conversation’s participants are faced with navigating cultural differences.
This is because cultural differences often manifest themselves in language.
However, Adams doesn’t simply frame language as something that is ineffectual
and destined to fail. He also exemplifies the flexibility language can grant a
person, showcasing the ways in which somebody can use intelligent rhetoric to
his or her benefit. Through his examination of the ways in which people
communicate, Adams challenges readers to avoid taking language for granted,
ultimately suggesting that its idiosyncrasies are worth bearing in mind when
trying to connect with others.
Communication, Adams
intimates, is complex and unwieldy. Whereas one person might find a certain
sentence harmless and unremarkable, that very same phrase might deeply offend
somebody else. This is made overwhelmingly apparent in a conversation between Arthur and Slartibartfast. On his way out of
Slartibartfast’s office on the planet of Magrathea,
Arthur mumbles a small aside, saying, “I seem to be having tremendous
difficulty with my life-style.” For Arthur, this sentence is nothing more than
an idle observation about the fact that things haven’t been going his way.
However, Adams chooses to use this moment to illustrate that even banal
sentiments like this one are subject to misinterpretation. “It is of course
well known that careless talk costs lives,” Adams notes, adding that “the full
scale of th[is] problem is not always appreciated.” Indeed, at the same exact
instant that Arthur complains about his “life-style,” a “freak wormhole” opens
in space, carrying his sentence to a “distant galaxy” where two civilizations
are teetering on the brink of war. Unfortunately, Arthur’s sentence about his “life-style”
translates—in this galaxy—into “the most dreadful insult imaginable.” Since the
leaders of the two opposing civilizations each think that the other has said
this, they embark upon a long and bloody war. Of course, readers know that
Arthur’s statement is nothing more than a simple expression of mild discontent.
However, in a different context, the very same words spark anger and violence.
In this way, Adams shows that language and communication are both highly
contextual and that “careless talk” can easily bring about disastrous
circumstances.
Although Adams
portrays language as unwieldy and potentially even dangerous, he also
highlights the ways in which a person can harness linguistic flexibility and
use it to his or her advantage. Ford
Prefect,
for instance, is a master at manipulating words when he wants to convince
somebody to do something. When, for example, he needs to tell Arthur that the
world is about to end, he finds himself having to trick Mr.
Prosser—the
construction foreman—into waiting to demolish his friend’s house, otherwise
Arthur won’t feel comfortable coming with Ford to the pub, since he thinks he
needs to continue lying in front of Prosser’s bulldozer. Approaching Prosser,
Ford asks him to assume that Arthur will continue lying in front of the
machinery all day. Having established this, he then asks if Prosser’s men are
“going to be standing around all day doing nothing” if this happens. Prosser
admits that this is likely. “Well,” Ford concludes, “if you’re resigned to
doing that anyway, you don’t actually need him to lie here all the time do
you?” Rather hilariously, Prosser thinks about this and then admits that he
doesn’t “exactly need” Arthur to continue
lying in front of the bulldozer. “So if you would just like to take it as read
that he’s actually here,” Ford says, “then he and I could slip off down to the
pub for half an hour. How does that sound?” Prosser says that this seems “perfectly
reasonable,” though Adams notes that the foreman is a bit confused. Ford then
adds that if Prosser himself wants to “pop off for a quick one” when they
return, he and Arthur would be happy to “cover” for him. “Thank you very much,”
says Prosser, who is suddenly confused. In this moment, Ford has completely
turned Prosser around, confounding the man by acting as if he’s trying to help him, not dupe him. By offering to “cover”
for Prosser later on, he puts himself in the position of doing him a favor,
which forces Prosser to assume the role of somebody who should be grateful, not
bitter. This, Adams suggests, is how somebody can influence an interaction. By
making use of the instability of linguistic communication, Ford manages to get
what he wants.
Whether or not
somebody uses language to gain control over a situation, it’s clear that
communication emerges in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy as inherently idiosyncratic. Indeed, Arthur often finds
it difficult to communicate with the people he meets in space. For the most
part, this is because these people are from other planets, which means they
have different ways of connecting with others. Ford, on the other hand, is a
seasoned hitchhiker who has been to many planets. As such, he knows how to talk
to people from different cultures, rendering him a deft and competent
communicator. In other words, he is well-acquainted with the fact that
cross-cultural communication is rather peculiar and unpredictable. This aligns
with Adams’s general outlook—language is unstable, but this is simply a fact of
life. When Arthur’s “life-style” comment sets off an enormous war, Adams notes:
“Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the history of
the Universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time, but that we
are powerless to prevent it. ‘It’s just life,’ they say.” The fact that people
are “powerless to prevent” miscommunication and misunderstandings suggests that
the unwieldiness of language isn’t worth worrying about. Rather, Adams
insinuates that people ought to embrace problems of communication and—when
possible—use language to their benefit.
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