Week Fourteen: Hitchhiker's Guide Book 1 (4pts)

  Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy begins with a pretty funny parallel between Arthur Dent’s house being torn down for a bypass and a voice warning Earth that virtually the same thing will happen to them as well. Throughout the rest of the novel, more obsessively dark but hilarious moments ensue presenting that life is essentially meaningless and that seeking an answer to everything just ends up depressing people. 

Adams’ opening description of Earth sets the tone for the rest of the novel. 

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.

Already, he’s outlining the rest of the novel. There are things that will not be explained and trying to do so will just ruin the fun of it. The joke of Deep Thought is that there’s no one from the “hyperintelligent” race that created it understand how it got to the answer 42. Instead of just living life, they wasted their time making a supercomputer that, in the end, doesn’t really give them all that they’re asking for. Compare this dreadful end to Zaphod’s life. The guy just kind of does whatever and doesn’t really ask questions. He is, arguably, the most content person within the novel despite the fact that he ruined his own brain. He doesn’t know why he’s taking the Heart of Gold and Trillian to Margrathea, he’s just doing it and having a great time. After all, your planet could very well be blown up because they need to construct a space expressway through it. There’s really no point in being caught up in the tiny details like money, why we’re here, etc. That just ruins the fun of it. 

This was my first experience with Hitchhikers and I was pleasantly surprised by it. I’ve known it as a household name for sometime, but I’ve always kind of dismissed it. I think I got caught up in the wave of ‘taking things too seriously’ which ruins the fun of reading science fiction sometimes. Adams doesn’t want to be literary and has no interest in explaining just how the Infinite Improbability Drive works. All of this is just a background to explore the comedy of life. Arthur Dent is having a pretty shitty time, but there’s no sense in bogging down a narrative with obtuse explanations or abstractions. Instead, we’re presented with a series of events and anecdotes that illuminate a particular comedic ethos approach to life. Just live! Blink and you’ll miss it! This was a comforting take to read after such a hard semester and I’m glad that I got to read it when I did.