The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

A foil to Arthur Dent’s innocent character, Ford Prefect is an altogether different kind of anti-hero: he is a wordly traveler, a researcher for the irreverent guidebook, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, stuck on Earth for the past fifteen years. He is considered eccentric, with a prodigious talent for imbibing alcohol and regaling listeners with outlandish tales: “He struck most of the friends he had made on Earth as an eccentric, but a harmless one—an unruly boozer with some oddish habits” (11). He blended into his new surroundings fairly well, claiming to be an out-of-work actor for the past decade and a half—something his Earth friends found perfectly plausible. However, “[h]e had made one careless blunder,” deciding on “the name ‘Ford Prefect’ as being nicely inconspicuous” (11). The Ford Prefect was a rather popular compact car produced in England by the Ford Motor Company between 1938 and 1961. Still, Ford manages to overcome this mistake because he “was not conspicuously tall, his features were striking but not conspicuously handsome” (11). His heroism derives from the sole fact that he is an alien with alien technology that serves to detect alien ships which can help him get off the planet before it is destroyed, dragging Arthur along with him.

Ford is conspicuous in one specific way: He is a rather cool character, both in the sense of keeping calm in the face of extraordinary circumstances and in the sense of being fashionable. For example, he always travels with his towel, which renders him ultra-cool. As The Guide notes, “What the strag [nonhitchhiker] will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the Galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through and still know where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with” (21). As The Guide renders it, in intergalactic slang, Ford is “a frood who really knows where his towel is,” wherein “frood” describes a “really amazingly together guy” (21). A man of action, Ford always knows just what to do, even in the face of the infamously inhospitable Vogons. After all, “[h]e knew where his towel was” (25).

The newly-elected President of the Galaxy, Zaphod Beeblebrox, is either an inspired con man or a frustrated genius, depending on the day and who one asks. On his securing of the presidency, the response is bemused: “Many had seen it as clinching proof that the whole of known creation had finally gone bananas” (27). What many do not know is that the President of the Galaxy has no power other than the power of disruption, the task of taking attention away from the actual centers of power. In this way, “Zaphod was amazingly good at his job” (29).

He arrives on the scene of the unveiling of the Heart of Gold, a gleaming new spaceship equipped with the Infinite Improbability Drive, in a speedboat, sending up arcs of water and churning the sea into great waves and plumes of foam. As the narrator explains, “Zaphod loved effect: it was what he was best at” (29). He is initially described as an “adventurer, ex-hippie, good-timer (crook? quite possibly), [and] manic self-publicist” (28). He also, quite uniquely, boasts two heads and a third arm, courtesy of elective personal enhancements. Thus, Zaphod is both a larger-than-life figure, purposefully cultivating an outsized image, and a familiar archetype—that of the charismatic outlaw who harbors a good heart underneath his rough-hewn exterior and questionable motives.

Zaphod is openly vain, obsessively tuning the radio for news of his exploits even as staggering coincidences—like the ship rescuing Arthur and Ford from outer space—pile up around him. He admits to Trillian that he would rather have saved the stowaways than leave them to die even though he is irritated by their presence. He portrays himself as an unflappable rogue, though underneath the showmanship, he is troubled by his lack of self-awareness. Later, the reader discovers that Zaphod has severed parts of his own brains in order to conceal his memories and motivations. He admits, in a moment of uncharacteristic honesty, that “’whenever I stop and think—why did I want to do something?—how did I work out how to do it?—I get a very strong desire just to stop thinking about it. Like I have now. It’s a big effort to talk about it’” (97). In this way, Zaphod becomes a metaphor for modern alienation: He is a stranger to himself.

While Trillian is a minor character in the book, she is significant because of her connection to Earth and to Arthur, albeit tenuously. Her presence embodies the astronomical improbabilities that have brought the cast of characters together. She is first introduced as “a girl that Zaphod had picked up recently while visiting a planet, just for fun, incognito” (31), which minimizes both her importance and her agency. In fact, Trillian is incredibly intelligent, highly-educated, and more than a little adventurous. Explaining her decision to hitch a ride with Zaphod, she remarks, “’After all, with a degree in math and another in astrophysics what else was there to do? It was either that or the dole queue again on Monday’” (74). This is both an acknowledgment of Trillian’s superior intellect and a satirical assessment of the employability of academics—an acerbic comment on British society as well as the academy itself.

Trillian is also an intertwined part of the improbable set of coincidences that manifest throughout the book. She is not only from Earth, she also knows Arthur, having met him at a party before ditching him in favor of Zaphod. It turns out that the number representing the improbability of Arthur and Ford’s rescue from deep space, in “a totally staggering coincidence” (54), happens to be the telephone number to the apartment on Earth where Trillian met both Arthur and Zaphod. Later, the book implies that the telephone number is, in fact, Trillian’s number (70).

Trillian also brings the mice aboard the ship, who turn out to be extraordinarily significant to the plot. In addition, she is perceptive, seeing through Zaphod’s bravado by recognizing “he never really understood the significance of anything he did” (62) and becoming weary of his showy antics. Her calm intellect serves as the antithesis to Zaphod’s sometimes false and always exaggerated bravado.