Ratliff

The narrator just calls him "Ratliff," but near the end Gavin Stevens calls him by the initials that readers of Faulkner's fictions know well: "V.K." (280). One of Faulkner's own favorite characters, V.K. Ratliff is "a slender man, not overly tall," who invariably wears a "tieless faded perfectly clean blue shirt"; the narrator also calls him "a universal": "among men a man, among ladies a gentleman" (86). As a salesman, first of sewing machines, then (in this story) of "compact" organs, and then "radios and TVs" (87), he is equally at home in town parlors and on the porches of country stores. He is a vernacular figure ("his diction still rather that of Varner's store in Frenchman's Bend than Jefferson," 86); he is even described as a kind of 'redneck': the narrator refers to his neck as both "sunburned" and "shaved" (88). In this story, as throughout the Snopes trilogy into which this story was interpolated, Ratliff is a working class ally of patrician Gavin Stevens in the campaign to resist Snopesism. When the narrator identifies him as someone "who has watched human folly yet still remained capable of believing in human aspiration," he pays him perhaps the ultimate Faulknerian compliment (86).