In several ways, The Ring and the Book presents itself as an epic. It is long, and long in the epic way: twelve books. It gives the impression of moving from place to place and from incident to incident, and it contains plenty of conflict, harrowing episodes, and violent struggles. And yet upon reflection, The Ring and the Book quickly loses its savor of the epic. Its length derives not from the sequential narration of causally-related, Fate-driven events of historical importance, but rather from a series of competing analyses of just one relatively brief and decidedly unheroic set of events. Very little in the way of incident is presented to the reader directly; instead, almost all of the events in the central story are recollected and accounted for in different ways by different speakers. The Ring and the Book seems to be more an epic of words than of deeds. As critics we speak of Browning's psychologizing, of his probing of motives, of the potential indeterminacy of the very truth he tells us he seeks to reveal. The arguments and structures of the poem thus aspire to the condition of irony, as may be confirmed by the poet's own doubts about his achievement at the end of Book 12. On this reading, Browning prompts us to a relativist, modernist, or even post-modernist stance, a view of considerable attractiveness.