But at the end of the novel, the reader has no clear idea about the possibility of "right meanings". This is summed up by John's discovery of the Bokononist paradox, "the excruciating necessity of lying about reality, and the excruciating impossibility of lying about it"28; that there is no “true” or “right” answer to humanity's lack of purpose in the unpredictable nuclear age. Except perhaps what Voltaire and Kant suggested in Hope, Sleep and