Dubliners

Grace

Grace: Summary

"Grace" centres on Tom Kernan, a once charismatic salesman now turned alcoholic. After a fall, his friends try to reform him by inviting him to a Catholic retreat.

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Overview & Analysis

The central character is Tom Kernan, a salesman, whose life has spiralled into alcoholism. The narrative starts with Kernan falling unconscious down the stairs of a pub after excessive drinking. This serves as the initial conflict, setting the stage for a deeper exploration of alcoholism and its impact on Kernan and those around him.

Kernan's friend, Mr. Power, rescues him and reveals his name. The friendship between Kernan and Power forms a significant part of the narrative. Kernan's wife also plays a crucial role as she contends with her husband's deteriorating state.

While Kernan recovers from his fall at home, his friends, Power, M'Coy, and Cunningham, visit him. They discuss various topics, eventually settling on religion. Their conversation is full of comic misunderstandings about the church, reflecting a superficial understanding of faith. This discussion leads to their plan to get Kernan to attend a Catholic retreat with them at a Jesuit church, hoping this would bring about a change in his life.

The narrative moves to the Jesuit church in Gardiner Street, where all the men listen to a priest's sermon. The shift in the setting brings a diverse perspective to the story and presents an opportunity for the characters, especially Kernan, to introspect and reflect on their actions and beliefs.

The story subtly explores themes of friendship, faith, and redemption amidst the turmoil of alcoholism. The friends' efforts to reform Kernan reflect their deep concern and a longing for Kernan's redemption. However, their approach towards religion shows a lack of true comprehension of faith, highlighted by their comical errors about the church. Kernan's initial non-responsiveness to the idea of the retreat might suggest his reluctance to change, or possibly, his scepticism towards religion as a solution to his problems.

On a deeper level, the story demonstrates the futility of superficial solutions to profound problems. Kernan's continued gin-drinking in Joyce's later novel "Ulysses" indicates the failure of his friends' plan and proposes that meaningful change can't be forced or superficially induced, but must come from within.

The reference to Dante's Divine Comedy, as noted by Stanislaus Joyce, provides a structural and thematic framework to the story. It echoes the stages of inferno (Kernan's fall), purgatorio (the friends' intervention and the retreat), and paradiso (the sermon at the church). But unlike Dante's journey towards redemption, Kernan's journey is marked by failure, suggesting an inherent tragedy in his life.

As is common in Joyce's works, there's an "epiphany" — a moment of sudden revelation or insight. In "Grace," this arguably comes when Kernan's friends recommend the idea of the retreat. Kernan's silence or non-responsiveness may reveal his realization of his desperate condition and the difficulty of the journey that lies ahead, although it's undercut by the eventual failure of his friends' plan.

In essence, "Grace" is a powerful narrative that encapsulates the struggles of alcoholism, the complexities of faith and friendship, and the challenges of personal reformation. It provides a critical commentary on the superficial understanding of religion and its ineffectiveness as a panacea for deeply entrenched personal issues. Through the character of Kernan, Joyce paints a bleak yet realistic picture of the human condition, broken by vice and desperately seeking grace and redemption.

Characters