“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” The radio serial The Hitch-hiker’s guide to the Galaxy illustrates a series of themes in many different ways. The excerpt exposes the themes “The importance of humanity”, “42”, the probability of the improbable, and aliens rule. Throughout the entire passage, there are recurring references to such themes, which is done with the use of motifs and literary devices. In this commentary, we will consider how motifs such as ‘Earth’, Ape man, the answer, Zaphod, and mice are employed together with irony, juxtaposition, absurdity and diminishment to express the themes and ideas in the passage.
The theme that is most expressed throughout the fragment is ‘ the importance of humanity’. Two examples that demonstrate how this theme is shown in the passage can be the ways that the characters relate to the earth and to the humans. Firstly, by observing how the author portraits the humans, it is possible to see that there is a tentative to diminish our image. With expressions such as ‘strange ape like beings’ and ‘nothing that as ever happened on earth could possibly make sense’, we can perceive that the passage clearly wants the audience to think that the humans are insignificant and primitive. The motifs ‘ape like beings’ and ‘the earth’ are used in this context, which reinforces the thoughts of the audience and makes the humans seem even more ridiculous and simplistic. In this fragment, the author makes use of literary devices such as irony, diminishment and absurdity with the objective of surprising an shocking the audience. Since we do not expect to be regarded and treated as an inferior race, we pay even more attention to what is being said. The literary devices work together with the motifs as ways to emphasize what the theme expresses and the audiences ends up actually paying more attention to our ridiculousness and weirdness.
HHGG commentary excerpt
There is a reminder within this introduction that the earth was in fact a giant computer run by mice and created solely for the purpose of determining the question to the answer 42. This answer to the question of the meaning of life, the universe and everything and the idea of earth as a program is highlighted by the use of a biblical reference and an absurd creation story from ‘another’ intelligent species . Thus the recurring themes of the importance of humanity, mostly harmless, aliens rule, 42 and the probability of the improbable are all reintroduced before returning to the narrative itself.
These themes are of course all intertwined as 42, the all important answer cannot now be properly questioned due to the untimely destruction of earth, raising the importance of the seemingly (until now) unimportant ape like creatures, who populated its surface. The double irony is that they are unimportant, but may now prove to be of great importance (and will later again prove to be of no importance of course). Their unimportance is emphasized by the use of jargon and hyperbole, ‘hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings, gigantic supercomputer,’ juxtaposed against the description of mankind as ‘strange ape like beings’ and ‘totally unaware’. All of this is of course both wildly improbable and totally absurd which is of course the fundamental driving force and intention of this work.
The discussion of creation by means of the biblical allusion, its antithetical response and the absurdist creation story which follows, all serve the absurdist intent of the author which sets the tone for the episode as well as leading nicely into the reintroduction of the creation story of the earth….
