Ratliff

Ratliff is a traveling sewing machine salesman who tells the story of Luke Provine's bout with hiccups and his own part in helping 'cure' them. A garrulous man of the people, Ratliff speaks in a folksy vernacular that stylistically sets him apart from the story's more formal frame narrator. He himself becomes a butt of the joke he tries to play on Provine when, unbeknownst to him, Ash appropriates his scheme for his own purposes - an ironic outcome that Ratliff accepts with good humor. Ratliff is a frequent character and narrator in Faulkner’s fiction, playing a major role in the Snopes trilogy: The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion. In the first published version of the story in The Saturday Evening Post, he was identified as V. K. Suratt; for the revised versions of the story in Collected Stories and later in Big Woods, following his practice in later works in which this character occurs, Faulkner changed his name to Ratliff.