I'm a big fan of all 7 fiction books written by Douglas Adams.
However, I have never understood the ending to Dirk Gently's Holistic
Detective Agency. Why does causing Coleridge to not write the rest of
the poem "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" cause the ghost to not
destroy the human race? I actually went and read that poem and now I
at least know where the Albatross references come from, but I still
don't understand the ending.

You'll find quite a lot of analytic material on this subject in the
delightful alt.fan.douglas-adams newsgroup:

"Can someone explain the ending to Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective
Agency?

Here are two postings which explain it best:

From: bhack@mundil.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Brendan Hack)
Date: Tue, 12 Nov 1991 23:08:13 GMT

First of all you need to know something about Coleridge. There was
never a second part of the poem _Kubla Khan_. Yet, at the end of
Chapter 6 when The Director Of English Studies is reading _Kubla Khan_
the book says 'The voice (that of the director of english studies)
continues, reading the second, and altogether strange part of the
poem.'

	In the book, _Kubla Khan_ has a second part. The book is not actually
set in our existance. It is set in an existance in which the second
part of _Kubla Khan_ exists. This second part of the poem tells the
ghost about the existance of the time machine and how to travel back
and stop the ship from exploding. As we well know the explosion of the
ship is what caused life to begin on this miserable little planet of
ours. When Dirk and Reg realised this they simply went forward in time
to when Coleridge was writing the second part of _Kubla Khan_ and
stopped him. Dirk just interrupted him and talked so much that
Coleridge forgot what the second part was going to be about and
therefore could not finish it!  This change of history sent reality
back into our perspective and the human race lived on (Yay, yippee!).

	Quite simple really.

From: Torsten.Lif@eos.ericsson.se (Torsten Lif)

The second part of KK was written by Coleridge *while possesed by the
ghost* and is the ghost providing info, not the other way around.  I
think the info is about the ship that is still in orbit around Earth.

By confusing Coleridge (and introducing the albatross that then
appears in the Ancient Mariner), Dirk got rid of the directions to
find the orbiting spaceship (which they also sabotaged, but not until
Reg had stolen some music [by bringing Bach there?]). Since they
aparently had access to suitable explosives (the spaceship blew up in
such a spectacular fashion that it could be seen from Earth), maybe it
was also they who sabotaged the ghost's shuttle so that it all got
started, too?"

Newsgroup post, alt.fan.douglas-adams: Douglas Adams FAQ
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=alt.fan.douglas-adams_703252834%40kauri.vuw.ac.nz&oe=UTF-8&output=gplain

"Having just read the faq, the explanation there does not agree with
my explanation. (My apologies if this has been discussed before). The
faq seems to imply that the second part of the poem describes the time
machine and things, which seems a bit of a jump to make. My
explanation is that becuase the second part of the poem never gets
written, it never gets read out at the dinner, so the little girl
never gets bored, so Reg never uses the time machine to do the trick
with the pot, which needed him to go to the planet with the sand to
hide his tan, which is what allowed the ghost to do something vital."

Newsgroup thread, alt.fan.douglas-adams: "Ending to Dirk Gently's
H.D.A"
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&newwindow=1&safe=off&th=98c7e1d0390f74cb&rnum=2

I hope this helps. Thanks for asking an interesting question. I am
going to hunt down my copy of DGHDA tonight and dive in for a
refresher course!

My Google search strategy:

Google Groups: "dirk gently's" ending
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=%22dirk+gently%27s%22+ending&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en

If either of the links above does not function, or if you need
anything more, please request clarification before rating my answer,
and I'll gladly offer further assistance.

So long (and thanks for all the fish),
pinkfreud

---

Clarification of Answer by pinkfreud-ga on 17 Nov 2002 21:33 PST

Thanks for the five-star rating! I agree that the answers to the
elaborate ending of DGHDA are not very satisfying. But, compared to
the dizzying wit of the incomparable Douglas Adams, what would be?

At least those newsgroup users didn't attempt to express their
analyses in the form of Vogon poetry. ;-)

~pinkfreud

Thanks! I guess those answers are as good as any, but they're still
not particularly satisfying. I guess I'll just have to accept that it
was the journey that was important, not the destination. I still love
that book along with the other 6.

Thanks to mxnmatch for the neat question and to pinkfreud for the
equally neat research.

Three brief comments:

Adams' fictional device of the "second, and altogether stranger part"
of Kubla Khan has historical root in the 1816 preface Samuel Taylor
Coleridge provided to his "poem", in which he describes it as an
unfinished fragment of a larger work that occured to him spontaneously
and with totality while under the influence of opium.  There he blames
the inability to record more than the small initial portion of this
conception to interruption by a "man from Porlock".  Naturally
Coleridge's claim has been the subject of considerable literary
speculation:

http://www.eiu.edu/~multilit/studyabroad/lyricalballads/comp3d.htm

The Dirk Gently tale has many similarities to a Doctor Who episode
(featuring the Tom Baker Doctor and Romana II) set in Paris and
involving a climax in which a spaceship explodes on a prebiotic Earth
(presumably sparking the seeds of life here).  Douglas Adams wrote
episodes of Doctor Who, and the plot similarities make me suspect this
might have been one of his.

Finally, we can add a eighth book to the Douglas Adams' opus:  The
Salmon of Doubt, published posthumously.  It consists of varied essays
and creative writing, including a fragment of a fictional work in
progress from which the book takes its name.

regards, mathtalk

'City of Death' is the Dr Who story you refer to and was indeed
written by Adams. In addition, the scene with the sofa on the
staircase (can't recall if thats Holistic Detec.. or Long Dark
Teatime) had also been penned by Adams for another Dr Who story he
wrote for Tom Baker, the never-completed Shada (which you can
nevertheless get on video with narrated in-between bits)

And may I add, as a big Adams fan, a big "thank you" to Pink and all
other commentators. I always wondered about the ending of DJHDA
myself.

The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner is sublime! I especially enjoy
Coleridge's description of the woman dicing with Death in the phantom
ship because it never fails to effectively evoke the chthonic beauty
and power of Leucothea (i.e., the White Goddess):

Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold,
Her skin was white as leprosy.
The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold.

As for the brilliant pinkfreud, she never fails to provide the
customer with a superb answer!