The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe Analysis

Sometimes the journey is the destination. All you have to do is look for a new perspective. In this piece of literary art, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams, Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox, Trillian, and Marvin the robot go on a journey through the universe to find answers to a simple question, “What is the meaning of life.” We as readers of course know the answer is 42, but they want a more in depth, “sophisticated” answer. Meeting aliens from different galaxies along the way, they have an experience that no other living organism could have. The destination was never the answer for the question, it was the journey. When Ford and Arthur crashed on the two billion year old Earth, they met and greeted some ‘cavemen’ that don’t really know how to speak. So Arthur has the great idea to write letters on stones and teach them the alphabet. After much confusion, one of the cavemen spell out, “Forty-two” with the letters. Arthur puts all of the rocks in the bag now and takes them out randomly, like scrabble. What the rocks spell this way was, “what do you get if you multiply six by nine?” The answer is 54, but Arthur and Ford say it’s 42. They were so stuck on the answer of any question being 42, that

“It was a ship of classic, simple design, like a flattened salmon, twenty yards long, very clean, very sleek. There was just one remarkable thing about it. ‘It’s so . . . black!’ said Ford Prefect. ‘You can hardly make out its shape . . . light just seems to fall into it!” (238) So it was pretty great. The reason this is important is because it isn’t. It doesn’t get them to their destination; it prolongs it. They then get beamed up into another ship that follows into crashing into the two billion year old earth, which then follows into the whole scrabble