INTERPRETATION OF Billy Budd has been copious and elaborate, with the natural result that in some instances at least it has reached the stage of overrefinement. Two views of Melville's novelette are interesting heresies, disastrous in their implications but persuasive enough so that they cannot be ignored. One is the notion that the irony which Billy Budd unquestionably contains is of a type which directly reverses the overt meaning of the story; the other, closely related, asserts the presence of a hidden interior narrator behind the apparent third-person narrator whom we would generally identify with Melville. According to this reading, the ostensible narrator is shallow, conventional, and platitudinous, while the concealed narrator is keen and malignant, a bitter mocker behind a bland faSade. Both of these views are provocative, and both are destructive and false. At the risk of unfairness, however, they will be dismissed without formal refutation in this essay. Tracking down heresies is dangerous and disagreeable. One is likely to get lost in the process, and in notably unpleasant surroundings. I will therefore offer a few observations only. The irony imputed by some critics to Billy Budd would if it existed be cheap, puerile, and perverse. This masterpiece of Melville's old age contains ironies and ambiguities aplenty, but they are such as arise naturally from profound meditation upon a tragic theme of great magnitude. They do not reverse the direct statements upon which our sense of the meaning rests, but modify, enrich, and complete them. Likewise the division of the narrator into two is unwarranted by any evidence, and lessens rather than