Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy Analysis

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Who would ever expect how handy a towel can be? According to Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a towel is a hitchhiker’s best friend, especially after he is stranded after an intergalactic construction team destroys the world. This is one of the many comical moments over the course of the novel, despite the surprisingly serious themes explored in it. Adams questions meaning and significance in the universe throughout the novel, and belittles the importance of human along the way. At a time when science fiction was near its peak in popularity, Douglas Adams used his experience in television and radio comedy to write the satirical classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which he explored similar themes as his contemporaries, the main a commentary on the folly in taking the universe seriously. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy centers on the adventures of Arthur Dent, a perfectly normal human being, who happened to be saved when an intergalactic highway construction crew of Vogons, an alien species, destroyed the world while his house is simultaneously destroyed by a terrestrial construction crew. After being saved by this annihilation of Earth by his friend Ford Prefect, whom he…show more content…
Carl Kropf states this idea perfectly when he summarizes the book in his piece “Douglas Adams’s ‘Hitchhikers’ Novels as Mock Science Fiction,” saying, “the main characters wander, apparently at random, from one setting to another and, while remaining themselves untouched by their experiences, they expose their own absurdities and those of the societies they encounter” (61). However, more simply stated, “the real joy of this book is in the weird stuff [that happens to Arthur Dent]” (Schmoop Editorial Team). And there is plenty of weird stuff. From bizarre aliens to the trivial nature of Earths destruction, Adams uses comedy and nonsense to make the point that taking the universe seriously is

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