Theme of Ultimate Doom (in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

Author's Note: This is the first (and more depressing) part. The second (and funnier one) is soon to follow!

There is not much worse than having your entire world blown to pieces.  I mean you could be blown up with it.  Or you could be treated to the slow agonizing death by torture, but really those are all just as bad as the Earth blowing up.  In the novel A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the Earth is blown up which has a detrimental effect on the story causing the theme to be one of ultimate doom.

One place we have evidence of doom in this book is the very beginning. Arthur Dent is lying in front of a bulldozer that is about to roll over him and his house right after, to build a bypass. He believes though that this is the worst thing that could possibly be happening.  But a greater doom looms in the distance, like a vulture waiting for a stumbling animal to fall.  You see Arthur’s whole Earth is about to be demolished to build a hyperspatial express route. Surely you can see how this would make any reader feel doomed.

Besides being doomed to never return home Arthur only has one friend left to him that is Ford Prefect.  Mr. Prefect is a traveling researcher for the Hitchhiker’s Guide and while he is humanoid he is not quite normal.  This doom, while seeming not too bad is most likely going to put a lot of pressure on Arthur. You see Ford knows about the universe and expects Arthur to keep up.  Combine that with the shock of everything he’s going through and he never expected, Arthur is going to be doomed to always be behind.

Now if that sorrowful tale of doom isn't enough to pull your heart strings then I'll let you in on a secret. This of course is the case of the smartest mammal on Earth. As you know humans are considered to be only the third, narrowly beaten by the dolphins. But the smartest mammals, the ones that were running the entire business of the Earth, were of course the mice. Yes the squeaking, cheese obsessed, sixties-sitcom-lady scaring mice. They had the Earth custom made for a higher purpose and were simply hiding themselves in plain sight. Doesn't that put a bug in your coffee, finding out that that very coffee was bought and paid for by the mice to help rule your world? No? Well enjoy your bug free coffee then. 

Well I suppose that all that is left is to answer the question all good readers ask at this point. That question being of course, so what. And indeed I must expand that question to answer it. I ask so what now. Should we mourn for the Earth, blown up in its prime? Or for Arthur's future,  which is now the desolate one of a hitchhiker? Or indeed should we mourn for the mice whose beautiful, and expensive, world was simply vaporized without so much as a by-your-leave? I believe that it is not these things that need to be mourned but indeed the happiness of the readership of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, who after reading a book with a theme of such doom will surely be rather doomed to unhappiness themselves.