structural:expansion
The Sound and The Fury

When Faulkner began writing the story that would develop into The Sound and the Fury, it "was tentatively titled ‘Twilight,’ narrated by a fourth Compson child," but as the story progressed into a larger work, he renamed it, drawing its title from Macbeth 's famous soliloquy from 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.

Immediately obvious is the notion of a "tale told by an idiot," in this case Benjy, whose view of the Compsons' story opens the novel. The idea can be extended also to Quentin and Jason, whose narratives display their own varieties of idiocy. More to the point, the novel recounts "the way to dusty death" of a traditional upper-class Southern family. The last line is, perhaps, the most meaningful: Faulkner said in his Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech that people must write about things that come from the heart, "universal truths." Otherwise, they signify nothing.