William Faulkner's -- "The Sound and the Fury"
The title of the novel is taken from Macbeth's soliloquy in act 5, scene 5 of William Shakespeare's Macbeth:
"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
Most immediately obvious is the idea of a "tale told by an idiot", in this case Benjy, whose version of the Compsons' story opens the novel. This idea can also be extended to the other two narrators, Quentin and Jason, whose narratives display their own respective varieties of idiocy. More to the point, however, the novel is recounting the death of a family, including some of its members, as well as the decline of the traditional upper-class Southern family. This is the significance of "The way to dusty death". The last line is, perhaps, the most meaningful; Faulkner later says in his speech upon being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature that people must write about things that come from the heart, or "universal truths". Otherwise, he states, the ideas published signify nothing.
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