V. K. Ratliff

Ratliff is a good-natured "itinerant sewing-machine agent," but is essentially a traveling barterer whose storytelling interconnects the various peoples of four counties. He trades "in land and livestock and second hand farming tools and musical instruments or anything" – and serves as a retailer of news with "the ubiquity of a newspaper and carrying personal messages . . . with the reliability of a postal service" (14). Although the novel has a third-person omniscient narrator, it often shifts and focalizes the narrative from Ratliff's point of view. Faulkner initially introduces Ratliff in terms of his "pleasant, lazy, equable voice which you did not discern at once to be even more shrewd than humorous" (14). Much of what is known in the novel is related to the reader through Ratliff. He lives in Jefferson with his sister and travels through "the better part of four counties with his sturdy team and the painted dog-kennel into which an actual [sewing-]machine neatly fitted" (14). He is a generous and unassuming man with a "bland affable ready face" and wearing "his neat tieless blue shirt" (14). Faulkner makes clear, moreover, that he will never marry (352). In Faulkner’s earlier narratives, Ratliff was named V.K. Suratt. In 1933, beginning with his composition of "A Bear Hunt," Faulkner renames him V. K. Ratliff, a change apparently due to the objection of a local person named Suratt. As Ratliff, he serves as one of the principal narrators of both The Town and The Mansion. The Hamlet marks the beginning of his vocation of observing and opposing the Snopes family, particularly Flem.