Improbability, Impossibility, and Absurdity Theme Analysis

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.