Symbolism-Towel

Entry: SYMBOLISM - TOWEL

In “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams, a towel is noted as an essential item. It fact, Ford Prefect speaks so much of it that the towel can be considered a symbol. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels. A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value—you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down

As a matter of fact, this is blatantly stated in the novel. “Here is what to do if you want to get a lift from a Vogon: forget it. They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy—not actually evil, but bad tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn 't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat and recycled as firelighters” (Adams Page 35). It is not even up to interpretation that Vogons are bureaucratic, as the quote deliberately says it. This must therefore mean that the Vogons represent the bureaucratic government. Additionally, as if this was not clear enough, Adams wrote, “‘Except…’ he thought again, which required looking at the ceiling—‘except some of the shouting I quite like.’ He filled his lungs and bellowed, ‘Resistance is…’” (Adams Page 43). In this quote, Adams stated that the Vogon guard had to look up at the ceiling to think, meaning that thinking was not something he did often. If the Vogons represent the bureaucratic government, Douglas Adams is mocking the bureaucratic government by saying that they do not think. Furthermore, the quote ends with “‘Resistance is…’”, which is likely an allusion to the Star-Trek Series,

First, Arthur Dent had his house knocked down against his will to build a bypass. To him, this was everything, yet no one else seemed to care whatsoever. One might even say that it was “the world” to him. However, just after this event Earth was being destroyed to build an intergalactic bypass. This shows that while something may have seemed so important to him, it really was not at all in the grand scheme of things. It demonstrates that many of our daily problems are simply insignificant, and we should not focus on them as though they are everything to us. Though it was displayed in only one event in the novel, the theme of insignificance is definitely a strong one to keep in