Point of View

"Life, the Universe and Everything" is narrated by an omniscient narrator who describes the inner thoughts and motivation of all the characters, however most of the story is told from the point of view of Arthur Dent, an Earth man from 1980s England. As Arthur travels through the universe, he acts as a representative of the reader who is experiencing the strange and unusual creatures from the rest of the galaxy for the first time. He is often bewildered by what he sees, but he has seen so many unusual things since leaving Earth to travel the galaxy that he is not surprised by much.

The narrative portions of the story are told in the third person and the past tense. Some chapters and long passages are written as if they are quotations from documents and are written in the present tense. There are also interspersed...