In which I spend 14 or so days reading sections of one of my all-time favorite books, Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and trying to understand how he wrote it.

Nothing about Arthur is actually funny or appealing, which I imagine is intentional. There’s so much weirdness around that Arthur’s slight resistance to it, but ultimately shrugging and going along, is probably needed for the story. If Arthur were a strong character with his own wishes and desires, the story wouldn’t be so much fun because he’d have more agency instead of reluctantly going along for a bizarre ride.
At the beginning, Arthur wants to keep his house from being knocked down to make room for a highway overpass. This is quickly subverted as Ford shows up, knowing it doesn’t matter in the least if the house is demolished because — dramatic irony (or is it some other kind? Is situational irony a thing?) — the entire Earth is about to be demolished to make room for an intergalactic overpass.
Arthur complains about bureaucracy and having to go down to the unlit basement to find the plans in a disused lavatory with a sign saying “Beware the Leopard.” And later on, the Vogons will elevate bureaucracy to religion, complaining about lazy humans who never bothered to view the overpass plans available at Alpha Centauri.

Starting with a small version of the story, and then making it huge and complicated and absurd, seems to me like it would be very difficult. But that is what Douglas Adams does.

We start very slowly, with Arthur in his house, waking up hungover. The reader, along with Arthur, gets little glimpses of something unusual going on. Yellow. Bulldozer. Then suddenly, Arthur realizes and rushes outside. Next thing we know, we’re in the mud.
Arthur squelches there for a while, arguing with Mr. Prosser, until Ford arrives. We learn Ford’s backstory immediately, combined with his big want: he’s an alien who has been stranded on Earth, which he doesn’t much like, for over a decade. He desperately wants to get off the planet.

Then there’s the pub scene. Because we’ve met both Ford and Arthur, we understand why they’re having very different experiences of this conversation. Arthur is continuing his squelching posture of trying to seem like he understands what’s going on when he actually has no idea. Ford is trying to explain what’s happening, but more for pragmatic reasons — to get Arthur to come with him — than to actually make Arthur understand. It’s an open question why he wants Arthur with him. It doesn’t matter much ultimately, especially since Ford is such a chaotic character, but plausibly it could be because Ford wanted to save somebody and Arthur was the only one pliable enough to go along. Also, Ford is no Zaphod, as we’ll see later. Zaphod would have rescued everybody at the bar and then abandoned them, or encouraged everyone to run outside but left them all there. Ford doesn’t seem to have made lots of connections during his time on Earth. He’s a little sad, like Arthur.

In the pub scene we’re also briefly offered a solution to Earth’s problems other than being demolished; there’s a little side story about how people had come up with solutions chiefly involving the movements of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper who were unhappy, but now a woman in the bar (or in a cafe somewhere else?) had figured it out and this time it was going to work. Except then the Earth was demolished and she would never get to tell anyone her plan.

This, again, is a smaller and more mundane version of a larger story that will happen in the series, where Earth itself is a computer designed to solve the problem of life, the universe, and everything, but it was destroyed just before spitting out the answer.