preview

Arthur Dent Character Analysis

Decent Essays

Take any ordinary person on Earth; destroy their home, their planet and their whole way of life and check to see if they are still sane at the end of it. Arthur Dent went through all of this and then some yet, he stayed relatively the same. On the other hand, his perspective of life and everything he thought he knew had several large transformations. Separate from his change in perspective, Arthur Dent is truly a very different breed of protagonist. His physical traits and nonchalant attitude are the very opposite of what one would expect of the “hero” in an adventurous sci-fi novel (Phillips).
Arthur Dent is the classic “Average Joe” in Adams’s novel The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (Shmoop). His character traits and emotions do not …show more content…

These qualities consist of and limit to sarcasm, petty jokes, and confusion. Usually, the “Average Joe” in a novel rises to some big occasion, but here that is not the case. Arthur remains pretty useless and does not help with hard circumstances intentionally. However, on two occasions, Arthur does step up to the plate. One was an accident, and the other was an act of blind courage combined with fear. Arthur accidentally saves everyone when he panics and hits a button that causes the two nuclear warheads that are launching towards them to turn into a bowl of petunias and a self-aware whale. The act of blind courage occurred when Arthur told the Vogon Captain that his torturous Vogon poetry was really good in an attempt not to get thrown out of the ship. According to Shmoop analysts, Arthur is an “unheroic doofus who wanders around in a perpetual daze not really knowing what's going on.” Arthur is comparable to a sleepy puppy on a car ride; he has no clue what is happening, and most times he could care less about …show more content…

For a normal, everyday person, Arthur Dent goes through many challenging and unthinkable predicaments. Similarly, Adams’s readers are also put through comparable but not proportional scenarios by which their expectations of a classic or traditional science fiction novel are challenged. Though his viewpoint transforms throughout the novel, there are aspects of Arthur Dent’s being that do not change at all. Arthur Dent is stagnant, evident in his sarcastic and humorous tendencies, as well as his lack of interest and recurring panic

Get Access