How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
"It's the computer," explained Zaphod. "I discovered it had an emergency back-up personality that I thought might work out better."
"Now this is going to be your first day out on a strange new planet," continued Eddie's new voice, "so I want you all wrapped up snug and warm, and no playing with any naughty bug-eyed monsters." (19.15-6)
This is just a tiny joke, but we see what happens when our foolish heroes (or heroic fools) try to solve a problem. The original Eddie personality is totally annoying, so Zaphod switches it… to another really annoying personality. Adams drives home this defeat by giving us Zaphod's plan and then immediately showing us that it has failed. No waiting, here: we get to see pretty immediately that this is another defeat.
Quote #8
"We're going to get lynched aren't we?" he whispered.
"It was a tough assignment," said Deep Thought mildly.
"Forty-two!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?"
"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is." (28.2-6)
If we actually saw Phouchg and Loonquawl get lynched, that might be kind of a buzzkill. Luckily, that doesn't happen, but what does happen is that we learn how deep this defeat goes. Deep Thought has succeeded in finding the answer to life, but Loonquawl and Phouchg are still defeated since they never knew the real question. Even when you think you've succeeded in Hitchhiker's Guide, there's usually a defeat waiting just around the corner—and you didn't even know there was a corner there.
Quote #9
For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across—which happened to be the Earth—where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog. (31.8)
Boy, Adams really loves his anti-climactic let-downs, especially to express defeat. The first half of this sentence is full of exciting words that ramp up the action: the ships are "mighty," they "tore" through space, they "dived screaming." The second half, though, starts to introduce a little defeat when it mentions terrible miscalculation" and "accidentally swallowed." Then Adams hits us with the full force of this defeat: the whole battle fleet was swallowed by a "small dog." That's one heck of a defeat.