The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Guide within The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy becomes a symbol of accessible knowledge and discovery in the novel while also functioning as a meta-fictive element. The Guide is an electronic book filled with entries on the galaxy and is a best-selling phenomenon. The Guide “has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom” (6), with The Guide’s runaway success the result of two specific differences: “First, it is slightly cheaper; and second, it has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover” (6). Arthur consults the Guide throughout the novel, with the Guide providing explanations and advice about the Universe Arthur is now navigating. In a Universe filled with uncertainty and danger, the Guide provides a reassuring presence, and is the only source of authority not entirely mocked or undermined in the narrative, suggesting that literature can still be a source of enlightenment and entertainment. In creating an actual Guide within his own book, Adams suggests, in a meta-fictional fashion, that his own book is both a repository of vast knowledge and great wisdom.

The Babel fish is a potent symbol in the debate over whether there exists an intelligent higher power. Its name is an allusion to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, in which mankind angers God by attempting to build a tower together that can reach heaven. In response to mankind’s attempts, God creates multiple languages and scatters humans all over the earth, to make such united attempts at challenging his powers more difficult in future. The Babel fish in the novel is therefore an ironic answer to the problem of universal communication, as it once more provides a means by which humans can understand one another effortlessly. The “small yellow fish” appears unassuming, but allows for any language to be immediately comprehensible to the listener when placed within the ear. The controversy over such an unlikely and highly useful creature has reverberated throughout the Universe, with “such a bizarrely improbably coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance” causing quite a metaphysical stir (42).

Many suggest that the Babel fish proves the existence of God. However, others suggest that the Babel fish presents “’final and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God’” (42). The debate leads to a best-selling book by Oolon Colluphid, entitled Well That About Wraps It Up for God. Adams utilizes the symbolism of the Babel fish to raise questions about the metaphysical possibilities for an intelligent higher power, or God, while also raising the age-old issue of cross-cultural and crosslinguistic communication. As with every metaphysical conundrum introduced within the book, there is no concrete answer. The narrator ends the discussion on the Babel fish by noting, via The Guide, that it “’has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation’” (42), turning a tool for potential unity into, once again, a source of disunity and conflict.