V.K. Ratliff

V.K. Ratliff, an itinerant sewing machine and radio salesman, is unmarried, intelligent, observant, and highly articulate in his regional vernacular. He is portrayed as a down-to-earth intellectual, a "rural bucolic grassroots philosopher and Cincinnatus" (391). In Chapter 6, one of the three chapters in the novel that he narrates, he lets us know that "my childhood too come out of that same similar Frenchman's Bend background" that Flem is from (154). As Gavin Stevens's "special crony" (391), he serves as a counterpoint to the former's cosmopolitanism; despite Ratliff being "unschooled, untravelled, and to an extent unread, Ratliff had a terrifying capacity for knowledge or local information . . . to match the need of any local crisis" (419). He keeps track of the Snopeses' behavior in Jefferson and intervenes at key moments, such as to cause Clarence Snopes's downfall in his political campaign and to help secure the early release of Mink Snopes. V.K. stands for Vladimir Kyrilytch, a family name passed down through the generations since the American Revolution, "one Ratliff in every generation for them whole hundred and fifty years since your durn Yankee Congress banished us into the Virginia mountains" (175); he explores his ancestral roots during a trip north-east to New York and Saratoga with Gavin Stevens. He is one of Faulkner's favorite characters, a major figure in the Snopes trilogy, and one of the several first-person narrators in both The Town and The Mansion.