A pangalactic gargle blaster of Lilliputian proportions: A comparative analysis of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Abstract

Douglas Adams and Jonathan Swift are satirists who lived and worked 250 years apart. Swift's eighteenth-century text, Gulliver's Travels, tells the story of an Englishman's adventures during numerous sea voyages that bring him into contact with fantastical peoples and places. Adams's twentieth-century text, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, relates a hapless Englishman's trials and tribulations during an intergalactic voyage which takes him and his companions to bizarre destinations. This study considers key similarities and differences between the texts. Resonances between Gulliver's celestial navigation in the eighteenth century and Arthur Dent's navigation among those very heavenly bodies in the twentieth century are explored. The novels are examined for evidence of satire, the travel genre, proto science fiction and mock science fiction and for generic similarities between the works. Through a process of elimination, Gulliver's and Arthur Dent's respective journeys are abstracted, summarised and represented graphically. Communication theory and linguistic trends during the Enlightenment and the twentieth century, as well as the science and technology of each era are also briefly reviewed. This study finds that, through the exploitation of the journey as literary device which allows Gulliver and Arthur Dent to view England and Earth from different places and from different times, both Swift and Adams are able to comment on and satirise humankind. The illustrations of the journeys highlight the differences between the two novels in terms of structure and adherence to markers of time and place. Lemuel Gulliver's journeys are shown to be radial voyages with England as the core location of departures and arrivals, whereas Arthur's appear to be random and follow neither the expected and known rules of travel, nor the laws of time and space. The study furthermore considers the nature of the locations visited and finds resemblances and differences between the authors' and readers' known worlds, and the fictitious worlds described. This naturally leads to a consideration of the degree of alienation experienced by the protagonists and, indeed, humanity. Finally, the texts are examined for communication problems faced by the protagonists. The conclusion of this study suggests that in Gulliver's Travels and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy both Adams and Swift show their awareness that language is not neutral, and that it possesses the power to entertain, inform, deceive and destroy. Both texts function metonymically to highlight the perilous complexity of the human condition and show that humanity's journey through space/time in the twentieth century remains as treacherous as one by sea during the Enlightenment.